Just to check: you understand that the mask doesn't protect you, right? It's supposed to protect *others* in case you're already infected. I ask because your wording seemed unclear to me: if you're worried about catching Indian Kung Flu (Shastarvidiya?), a booster shot might or might not be a good idea, but the mask is irrelevant to that. The mask is only relevant once you've *already caught Delta*.
I wasn't trying to be snide, friend. I just wanted to make sure you understood that you don't really need the mask to protect *you*; i.e. it doesn't have much to do with fear management.
I would be fine sending my unvaccinated elderly parent[1] into a room with known infected people if they were wearing a well-fitting N95, KN95, or P100 mask. They keep out particles very well, and the virus that we are worried about travels by particles.
Right now, even Delta isn't dangerous to fully vaccinated people. Your chance of death goes down by 3 or 4 orders of magnitude. If you are still concerned because reasons, and really don't want to wear a mask, you could get a blood test to verify that the vaccine worked properly. I think https://www.t-detect.com/ will detect that your cells work to detect and fight an infection, but their homepage says that information on vaccinated people is "pending."
[1] My parents are both vaccinated so this is theoretical.
As usual, any discussion of masks that doesn't mention which *type* of mask, is close enough to useless as makes no difference. People should be ashamed of writing articles like that. At least if you click through to the full text of the Lancet study, they acknowledge that some masks are better than others, but not in any qualitative way that would contextualize the "65%" number. And UC Davis doesn't even care.
This is correct in tendency, but as always, the truth is more complicated.
FFP2 masks protect you and others, and are very good at that in both directions.
For surgical masks, it is correct that the protective effect for others is higher than the effect for yourself. But the effect for yourself is still far from zero, perhaps more like 50% (only a ballpark number, it depends a lot on the situation).
Have you seen *anyone* wear an FFP2 mask in public? Maybe this is regional, I don't think I've seen a single one the whole pandemic. I'm highly skeptical of the surgical mask protection claims, after previous rounds of "let's juggle the truth to get the plebs to obey".
Yes, all the time. I am living in Switzerland. I would estimate that 20-30% of the people in public transport wear FFP2 masks, and I hear similar things from other places in Europe. It's also similar in other indoor situations. In Austria, it was even mandatory in public transport until a few weeks ago.
I also have the impression that the "juggle the truth" scandal is mostly a US thing. What I got from the news at the beginning of the pandemic was "we don't know, and we don't want a mask shortage in hospitals, so please don't wear them".
I would have wished that the "we don't know" statement would have been dropped earlier, but I don't feel cheated. I don't remember officials telling me that masks would hurt, except for the quite reasonable warning "don't get careless just because you are wearing a mask".
Well, Switzerland. I recall once sitting in a public rose garden in some major Swiss city, forget which, and observing that (1) none of the beautiful free roses had been clipped and taken by random citizens, and (2) this was apparently accomplished by the city government merely posting a small sign by the entrance that said "please don't pick the roses."
First: I violently hate masks, so you have all my sympathy.
Second: I am not sure I am the kind of expert you want - I've been following the news a lot but have no special expertise on virology or immunology. Going on my impressions from things I've read, however:
Natural immunity is extremely reliable (not 100%, but close) for up to six months, and probably longer, versus the original variant. You get case studies of reinfection prior to that, but serious studies of preselected groups (those I could find when I did the research) find almost no cases. Vaccination is currently expected to be on a level with or better than (not sure why, but it's possible the big doses that lead to the nasty side effects actually do some good?) natural immunity, and IIRC we have at least decent six-month data on it from all the original trial populations. So against normal covid, I wouldn't worry about a booster until after 6 months past vaccination. You can get antibody tests which will tell you how your antibodies look; those may be useful for figuring out whether you need a booster shot. (This information is from my doctor, so take it with a grain of salt, I know there is non-antibody-mediated immunity and she isn't a covid specialist.) There are rumors of a mythical anti-Delta booster; if one comes out and it's for real, I would probably get it to get rid of Delta's slightly increased chance of breaking vaccine-derived immunity, but it is only a slightly increased chance, and someone else might make a different call.
The only reinfection case I personally know was at 10 months past initial infection, so I would at least try to check antibodies once you got much past 6 months.
I've got less data on Delta. My impression is that with Moderna, you're looking at about -5% immunity against Delta - that is, if you had 96% you now have 89%, or something around there. However, the error bars on this number seem pretty large (and the Israeli data looks much worse than the other studies for infection but normal for hospitalization/death, I'm not sure why - could they possibly be running into vaccines timing out already? I can't remember *just* how early they started. Or somehow testing a different subset of the population?) Everything I've seen, including the Israeli data, claims the vaccines are still unreasonably high against hospitalization/death for Delta, just as they have been for every other variant - but unreasonably high still isn't zero. One article I read claimed that about 98% of covid deaths in May (US or state? I can't remember and I can't find the article - sorry!) were unvaccinated, which of course means 2% were vaccinated. Some of that is going to be people with preexisting immune issues, but definitely not all. So for personal safety, how concerned you should be about Delta given that you're vaccinated (with two shots of a very effective vaccine) depends on how good health you're in, how old you are, and how risk tolerant you are. I am personally trying to minimize high-risk events right now, but I'm very intolerant of risk and very tolerant of staying home.
In terms of how likely you are to be hit with a mask mandate or social pressure, it depends entirely on where you are. If you're in California, high odds - the Bay Area is currently under threat of one (although so far it is county health officers asking businesses to impose one, not a state-wide mandate). If you're in a USA red state, I wouldn't worry, but you're asking so I doubt you are. Beyond that it's a matter of reading the winds of social opinion, and you will have much more insight into your area than I will. FWIW, my prediction is that local (to me) coronavirus cases will keep going up for at least the next few weeks and possibly the next month and a half, and I would make a weaker prediction to that effect for the USA as a whole. If my super-vaccinated county is getting a wave with the same kind of slope as earlier waves - and it is - then US-level vaccination is not going to be enough (though combined with other advantages, like less dense population or more I'm not thinking of, it might be - part of why that prediction is weaker.)
So... if that'd cause a mask mandate, and my calculations apply to your location, and I'm right (I am not a superforecaster) then you'll get one. I'm sorry, and I hope they don't. I also hope someone chimes in with better data; I'm strictly a dabbler and there's a lot of information I want to have and don't.
I might add that UK is helpfully testing out whether it is ok to completely lift restrictions once you have a good portion vaccinated. And it looks pretty good at the moment. The numbers are going down, and the health care system is not heading to maxload. in Europe, this will probably cause a lot of other countries to to the same, and to relax restrictions (also concerning masks). I don't know whether it will have impact on US policies, too.
Uk has very high vaccination rates, but also used a lot of AstraZeneca, which is somewhat less effective. So it might be comparable to other countries. They do have a non-trivial number of hospitalisations. If I recall correctly, about 40% of hospitalisations are fully vaccinated people, and about half of those are people with suppressed immune system.
My personally conclusion is that for a fully vaccinated person without such conditions, corona is no more threatening than the flu for unvaccinated people, probably substantially less threatening.
The blog post concludes from the medical article that even mild or asymptomatic cases of covid result in significant loss of grey matter from the brain, particularly specific parts of the brain. The blogger theorizes it's setting people up for Alzheimer's.
I don't know of any evidence either way about "breakthrough cases" in vaccinated people having the same effect. (The cited data seems to have been available due to blind luck - it's a spinoff of some longitudinal brain research that started before covid.)
I haven't been reading the blog in question to rate the competency of the blogger, but if their claims are true, they should be better than I am at understanding such articles.
At any rate, this is the first credible source I've seen for widespread post-covid effects even in those with mild or asymptomatic cases. I fear it may be the tip of an iceberg. And I fear also that even "breakthrough" cases may turn out to be affected. Hopefully, my fears will be proven wrong eventually; meanwhile I'm glad that AFAIK I've (so far) avoided catching it.
For whatever it's worth, I'm very glad you've avoided catching it too - you're one of the people I worry about. I've heard a bit about that result, and I'm going to wait to pass judgment; I hope it's wrong, of course, but I'm keeping an eye on the case numbers and we'll reinstitute our preventative quarantine if it gets too bad. We've been doing a good bit of getting stuff that's needed taking care of for a while taken care of now, while we can, so we should be good to shut up again if necessary.
I should do a bit more of that (taking care of stuff that's been on hold for way too long, mostly because of covid); I've done some, but I've still got quite a bit left.
Correcting myself - I should NOT post pre-coffee - the blogger was citing different sources for loss of grey matter and relationship with Alzheimer's, and the only connection between them was that they were both mentioned in the same blog post.
One possible reason for the Israeli breakthrough infection rate is if they have more testing of vaccinated populations compared to other contexts, uncovering more cases of PCR positivity in asymptomatic or minimally symptomatic individuals (who I guess are baseline less likely to transmit than unvaccinated people with the same strain and symptom level but also Delta appears just generally easier to transmit in general). I don't know if that's the case, but if it were you'd expect to see lower total immunity numbers but not greater risk of severe disease or death compared to similarly vaccinated populations, like you do here.
Thank you very much. I could see that - I've been worrying about how accurate the numbers for asymptomatic cases in vaccinated populations are. My impression is that at least my state is mass-testing health care workers and teachers on a regular schedule, so you would think that would give us a test population (albeit a non-random one) to watch for frequency of breakthrough infections, but if there are any specific studies from that, I haven't seen them. (That said I've been less obsessive about checking than I was early-pandemic.)
That said, my feeling is that I strongly prefer a 96% chance of not having to test my 96% chance of not getting hospitalized or killed - you know? If the virus is spreading widely through the population, such that (sans precautions) I will get it, that is a much worse situation than if I have a very low chance of getting it *and* a very low chance of adverse effects if I do. That's why the Israeli data worries me as much as it does - especially if, as you theorize, it's more accurate than the rest.
I don't think the Israeli data is more accurate than the rest. That is, testing PCR positive may not be a meaningful measure of infection in a substantial proportion of vaccinated people, who may have enough viral replication to test positive but not enough to transmit effectively, and no or minimal symptoms or long-term risk. If different testing approaches between Israel and other countries mostly adds these types of essentially false positives, it could reasonably be viewed as less accurate.
Mostly coming back to replay though because I saw some recent data that suggests the purported Israeli difference in vaccine effectiveness is likely due to a statistical issue. From what I gather, the initial Delta spread in Israel (speculation: presumably due to where it was initially introduced?) was in cities with very high vaccination rates, but the numbers were calculated initially using the (lower) average vaccination rate for the entire country. Using the wrong denominator makes it look like the risk of infection is higher in vaccinated people than it actually is (and this became clearer when Delta started to spread elsewhere in Israel?). https://mobile.twitter.com/dvir_a/status/1420059141083631617
Israel started vaccinating in December, around the same as most developed countries, but it mostly completed it by March.
The jump in case counts in Israel may be much bigger than in other countries just because they had suppressed the pre-Delta variants to much lower levels by the time Delta hit.
They also had a relatively low fatality rate throughout the pandemic, suggesting that they had better testing and caught a larger fraction of the cases than many countries.
It would be hard to tell. It's one thing to be fired as a result of a public campaign, but much harder to tell if you're fired because of management being afraid of a public campaign.
I would also like to know if there's a name for this, as I do it constantly. I do have a reason, even if the behavior is unintentional: there are a lot of things to know, and if I had to store the reasons that I know all the things I know, I wouldn't be able to store as much knowledge. I've found that I recall the "why"s much better if they are inherently interesting to me (e.g. the proof of the irrationality of the square root of 2).
Honestly, this tendency is why I don't tend to debate people much.
Possibly, though I think the more likely result is that society holds a view or even many views that no one can precisely articulate the reasons to support.
I still do not know what it means for society to hold a view. It could means that all members of society unanimously hold the view, but that seems impossibly stringent. Maybe you could supply an example of a view that some society has held? I am probably being too literal.
"Society" holds a view when a significant portion of the population holds that view such that minority views are shunned or hide their true feelings, or actively try to move towards the societal view.
A couple of examples from the recent past (1950s?) that are no longer "societal" level views - 1) You should not have a child out of wedlock, 2) You should go to church on Sunday (or be Jewish). A couple of examples of societal views that are true more recently in our history, and hold currently - 1) You should not be racist, 2) You should not assault a gay person for being gay.
Note that none of these examples were 100% followed by everyone in society, and it's likely that quite a few more people secretly disagree with them but are unwilling to express that due to societal pressure to follow the general rule.
It happens all the time with me! But when I'm in a conversation or an argument I make a point to admit that I may not remembering the original source correctly. Usually I can use Google to find the original link/document. Frequently though I find I've somewhat misremembered what I originally read. I try to make a point of correcting myself. Unfortunately, the further you search back in time, the harder it is to find the article you're mentally referencing. Ive started to bookmark any link that's remotely interesting — which creates its own search issues when you have several thousand bookmarks...
For exactly this (vaguely remembering that I read something but not knowing anymore where exactly) I'm currently building a kind of personal search engine.
Which allows me to search through the full text of all my bookmarks, and also ebooks and papers I've read, notes I've taken in various systems etc.
It's not yet public though. But for full-text bookmark search maybe check out https://pinboard.in/.
How do we suffer from belief? For instance, unless you can prove your hypothesis that we suffer from belief, that's a belief. Are you suffering for this belief? ;-)
"The genuine rationalist does not think that he or anyone else is in possession of the truth; nor does he think that mere criticism as such helps us achieve new ideas. But he does think that, in the sphere of ideas, only critical discussion can help us sort the wheat from the chaff. He is well aware that acceptance or rejection of an idea is never a purely rational matter; but he thinks that only critical discussion can give us the maturity to see an idea from more and more sides and to make a correct judgement of it."
—Karl Popper, "On Freedom" in All Life is Problem Solving (1999)
Then you have not engaged in the sort of critical discussion that can give us the maturity to see an idea from more and more sides and to make a correct judgement of it.
What's your definition of superstition? Would any assumption that you have not tested be superstitious? For instance, would a belief that your parents are your biological parents be a superstitious belief? After all, they could have adopted you without telling you.
Of course, if you're a true rationalist you'll make sure get your folks and you to send swabs of your DNA off to Ancestry dot com to test your assumption. Otherwise you'll still be mired in the superstitious assumption that your parents are your natural parents. Before you jump in and answer this with a statement of certainty, remember that a lot of people who've taken these tests have been surprised to find out that their father wasn't their real father. Likewise, a enough white supremacists have discovered to their discomfort that they have some African American ancestry in their background — enough to publicly claim that these DNA testing companies are purposely lying about data to combat their racial purity agenda.
Anyway, that's neither here nor there. But would it cause you a wee bit of discomfort (aka suffering) if you discovered that your dad wasn't your biological dad? And would you spread your suffering in the name of Truth to the dad who raised you? So, in light of these hypotheticals, would you like to narrow down your arguments about superstition, understanding, and suffering?
One instalment of the comic Subnormality (which a cursory search failed to locate or I would have linked it) actually does feature a new word for exactly this. It's a neologism that went nowhere, though, so "officially" there is no word.
This is a standard sort of problem case in academic philosophy - the view that these beliefs are justified is much like the view known as "epistemic conservatism", but not quite the same: https://philpapers.org/s/epistemic%20conservatism
(The difference being that some people will say that all that matters for justification is the presently held strong belief, while others will say that it matters whether the past self actually did have good justification.)
Which is generally seen as A Good Thing, so I find it interesting that there can be so many negative associations with the process you mention (complacency, inflexibility, confirmation-bias, evidence blindness, wilful epistemic learned helplessness, etc).
My current framing of a similar issue is that it's a matter of plain social anxiety. Core of the problem being that I genuinely, deeply fear judgement, and the [nebulous sense of] damage to my reputation / sense of self it might cause. And progress is made by viscerally realizing how this fear is overblown. Nancy's idea-internalization strikes me as one pump for this.
Huh, I think I may be the opposite. If someone tells me something my first reaction is, "what about this other side of it?" When pushed I tend to push back, even when I perhaps agree with the direction someone is pushing me.
This kinda lines up with my transition from Liberal to Woke Adjacent.
The inciting event was the reaction of the white moderates/mild conservatives around me to the Kaepernick NFL kneeling situation. I watched them go from "This is outrageous, he should be fired/fined/arrested" to "what are black people even complaining about, MLK would be ashamed" to "Blacks are the most privileged group of people in the USA".
There are a million cops in the US. Black people are victimized by cops at much lower than the relative to white rate they commit crime and murder cops. I.e. rate(white victimized by police)/rate(white crime) = (1.2 ~~~~4.0)rate(black victimized by police)/rate(black crime) for various crimes and victimizations.
Conservatives being 100 iq shouldn’t change that black people aren’t being murdered by the millions by the boys in blue.
Some do, but at vastly smaller rates than are reported. Almost every popular story about police being mean to blacks people is twisted from the origin of the story to the point of being made up. and folds under light prodding. It’s not like there’s a bunch of Jews hiding in the server rooms making fake articles, the internet is just a mess and lots of videos and stories get chopped up and shared and it’s har to interpret stuff, and everyone looks really hard for how black people might be victimized even when it doesn’t happen. Sampling from a 350M strong country where half the people have tiny cameras, and base rate fallacy!
Meanwhile in progressive legal aid land there are lots of objectively awful things done to people, many of them black, by the police and especially the legal system. But the two don’t really overlap in content as much as you’d expect.
There's stop and frisk, which led to a lot of young black men being harassed by the police.
The Innocence Project finds a fair number of mostly black men with long prison sentences for crimes they didn't commit. It takes a long fight and solid evidence, and I assume they aren't finding all the cases.
You may be right about the most well-known cases, but that's just an argument from public attention.
Which is why early on they were denouncing people as xenophobic if they worried about COVID, and even afterward insisted that diseases shouldn't be named after their place of origin even though the prior pandemic this always gets compared to is the Spanish flu (which technically wasn't the place of origin, but just the place to first report it because it was neutral).
I'm not gonna pretend that that wasn't a hysterical over-reaction, and in exchange, you don't pretend that the "Chai-Nah Virus"/"Kung Flue" is purely neutral and not even a little bit totally fucking political.
There was widespread use of terms like 'Wuhan coronavirus' and 'China's coronavirus' before it was decided that this was a useful weapon in the culture war.
Once it was used as a weapon, it automatically became political, one way or the other.
Greek letters for the variants might be better than place names, considering that the place names are only where the variants were first noticed and possibly not where they originated.
The other thing is that nations are large or fairly large, and attribution to big regions isn't really much information.
I think that place names are much easier to distinguish than Alpha, Beta, Gamma, Delta, Eta, Iota, Kappa and Lambda. Beta and Eta are even hard to distinguish in speech. It seems aggressively elitist in that the one thing that the name encodes, that one variant is newer than another, is probably not something that most normal people would get, due to their lack of knowledge of the Greek alphabet. If they'd used the regular alphabet, it would at least have one clear benefit.
The big benefit of naming by place is that the early reporting typically mentions that place a lot, so the place name gets strongly connection to this variant. In contrast, spreading codes like Iota is purely artificial. This is even more true for the original variant. Who knows that this is called Alpha? I never see it mentioned.
The media can't really establish the new name without referring to China a lot, to transfer the association, but they are unwilling to name China due to their politics. So instead, they write their stories to keep it vague.
This issue is always going to exist, because the early reporting is never going to put a lot of effort into distinguishing the only existing variant from potential future variant. So you'll always end up having to retrofit a letter on that initial variant. When you use place names, the variant already has a designation.
Because those are the least arbitrary and easiest to notice aspects of the variant, making them the best ways to describe it. It also reflects that people commonly differentiate between things spatially and temporally.
It seems pretty universal that we can agree on where and when we start noticing a variant.
Note that the WHO also prefers to use a semi-temporal designation, as their Greek letters are ordered by order of discovery. Scientists also started off with temporal naming. The British strain was initially know as the 202012/01 variant. And yes, that is a date. Yet in subsequent naming without the date, you see that scientists are using different names: B.1.1.7 and 20I/501Y.V1. So you can see that as soon as they stop using the temporal designation, the naming becomes more arbitrary, divergent and less informative for outsiders. This lack of consistency happened despite these scientists being part of a fairly insular community which should make it easier for them to decide on a common name than the world at large.
just as my 5 cents, I probably prefer the greek letters (but I’m a math person, so I’m really used to them), but I found the swap from places to greek letters for COVID variant names difficult, since I couldn’t tell which matched up and thus couldn’t apply my previous knowledge to new articles easily.
"even afterward insisted that diseases shouldn't be named after their place of origin"
This is WHO policy since 2015. Back in February and March I was worried that this was getting lost in discussion of the variants, but the Greek letters are very helpful this way.
As I said, they *fixed* that shit policy six years ago. Someone above was pointing out that people continued to use the misleading location-based names for other diseases, which doesn't seem like a way to justify the policy.
"[D]iseases shouldn't be named after their place of origin" is the shit policy to which I refer, obviously. I thought you said the WHO had adopted this (shit) policy six years ago.
Oh, I got confused. I didn't realize you were *defending* the policy of naming diseases after places, when "Spanish flu" was the most prominent example given. It seems to me pretty obvious that you want to name a disease after its intrinsic features, so that people don't get confused, either by actual historical events that are no longer relevant (a disease that becomes endemic in a location different from the one it first appeared) or by fake historical events (like Spanish flu).
Is there some reason that you think naming diseases after places, or other extrinsic features, is a *good* thing, that we should do *despite* the clear problems it can lead to? (For purposes of this discussion, I will not make any mention of xenophobia or racism as potential problems, since I don't expect you are sympathetic to considering those to be problems here.)
A friend of mine says it's because it's full of conservatives.
His theory is that the liberal counterculture was successful enough for long enough that a large chunk of the next generation of predisposed clannish conservatives adopted the superficial facade of the counterculture as their clan, and took it over from the liberals.
Assuming that until the 90s liberalism correlated greatly with progressivism (and likewise assuming my friend's hypothesis), there'd be two effects. There'd be the genetic component to liberalism biasing the kids of progressives away from fourth-wave feminism (and toward the Grey Tribe i.e. the modern counterculture), but there'd also be the direct and indirect parental components* to cultural transmission biasing the conformist kids of progressives toward fourth-wave feminism (and away from traditional conservatism). The most obvious test (though not the easiest) would be examining the rate of fourth-wave feminism among biological children of conformist conservatives that were adopted by liberal progressives; it ought to be huge if this hypothesis is correct.
*Direct component = parents teach children values. Indirect component = parents seek to avoid schools/friends/places that will teach kids opposing values (e.g. traditional conservatives keeping their kids out of big cities during childhood and objecting to their kids being taught CRT; atheist parents keeping their kids out of religious schools and objecting to their kids being taught scripture).
I think this is broadly accurate but minus "conservatives". It's true that the pearl-clutching, fearful and narrow-minded "Mrs. Lovejoy" personality has traditionally been on the conservative side; it's also true (not to say blatantly obvious) that these personality types switched sides for some reason in the 2000s, but being a prig is something essentially distinct from believing in e.g. traditionalism or free market capitalism. I think it's both pat and liberal-self-congratulatory to classify them inherently as conservatives.
I'm not sure exactly what happened, but I'd hazard a guess that it has to do with feminism. Feminism became culturally hegemonic among women in the way you mention, such that it became an extreme low-status marker (or, conversely, high as a countersignal) for a woman not to be a feminist. Now, women have *always* made up the vast majority of neurotic forced-conformists (hence all the older terms, pejoriative or not, being heavily gendered), so once they had to conform to feminism, feminism itself automatically became conformist priggishness. You can see this pretty clearly in interactions between prominent early feminists and screechy twitter-feminists, the former often being baffled by the total disavowal of liberty and individualism by the latter in favor of strict Maoist conformism.
Indeed; Mrs. Grundy is a classic term for this type of person – another one of those gendered pejoratives, natch (which I only now see that I misspelled in my previous comment; d'oh!). I however belong to a generation more influenced by the early seasons of The Simpsons (and perhaps more low-brow than Scott et consortes); so that's where my associations go.
I confess I sometimes have racist ideas that pop into my head. It is not a hard confession to make, because I am pretty sure that nobody who grew up in the West in the 1980s and 1990s can avoid having racist, sexist, ableist, etc., ideas popping into their head. The difference between a racist asshole and not is not having the ideas or not, it is saying them or not. When a racist idea pop into my head, I think “this is racist: why did I think that? how can I avoid thinking it again?”. Sometimes I miss, and I am sorry for it. Acts and intents; no thought crimes.
Stated like that, it seems obvious to me that racism should be considered like a disease, much more than a moral failing.
And that is a very non-woke position!
Because you do not treat a disease by shouting at the sick.
The main arsenal of the woke against racism is made of shaming, insults, trying to get fired. This is not how to efficiently address a disease, this is how to treat an irreconcilable enemy.
I would rather not actively think about it, since I have trained myself to decrease it, and it was never that in the first place bad since my family is quite decent. It would be something along the lines: upon learning bad about somebody, thinking “of course [bad thing], they're [skin color]”, and then having to remind myself that it is the kind of comments awful politicians make, absolutely not the kind of comments I want to make.
Hmm, no offense and not trying to troll you but that sounds weird to me. Do you consider race a genetic/ ancestry thing? Or a social construct (which in the US is mostly, "if you look 'black' you are treated as 'black'." I've come around to the social construct view. The word 'race' is almost a word I don't want to use, because we aren't using the same definition.
To the best of my knowledge, race is a social phenomenon rooted in over-emphasizing a bunch of barely-related phenotype traits and a lot of mysticism about ancestry.
But I fail to see how it relates to my point. What I was saying is that when I grew up, people all around me, on TV, etc., would make racist comments or jokes, and since our brains learn by imitation, mine learned to generate the same kind of comments or jokes, and is now still wasting my time generating them. I have been contaminated by racism when young, and now I must make efforts to not let it turn me into an asshole.
OK that's fine. I do sometimes find myself making misogynistic jokes and then having to hold my tongue. So I understand why you might call it a disease, some attitude/ belief/ view that you grew up with and are now trying to shake.
I've got this evolutionary view of racism, that it is in part a way to separate 'the other' from my community/ family. So Us vs. Them. Moving beyond that and seeing worth in 'the other' is a higher calling. And rather than a disease, racism is part of the 'software' baggage that we carry from the past. The distinction from a disease is it perhaps had some utility in the past. (Deep past)
1. It is best for us all when almost everybody can get close to their full potential.
2. Social pressure and low-key discrimination against categories of people can prevent some from getting close to their full potential.
3. ∴ It would be better to reduce and eliminate social pressure and low-key discrimination against categories of people.
4. Offhand jokes against categories of people perpetuate social pressure and low-key discrimination.
5. ∴ It would be better to refrain from making them.
My generation has heard these offhand jokes in our youth, we cannot refrain from thinking them, and we probably cannot fully refrain from letting them taint our behavior, making us vectors of social pressure and low-key discrimination (but a lot less than the people who do not make efforts, which is where the woke are dead wrong).
But we can refrain from saying them, we can hold our tongue. If we do, our children will not ear these offhand jokes in their youth, and not learn to imitate them, and they will not become vectors of social pressure and low-key discrimination, or at least less. And that makes the world better.
Artificial memetic selection.
In a way, it is like wearing a mask to prevent infecting other people with a respiratory disease, not because it serves us right now: if we are contagious, we already have the disease, but because it serves all of us in the long run.
It is slow, it is not enough, but it is something we can all do with minimal effort.
After all, what is the point of making misogynistic jokes? Getting a cheap laugh from fellow assholes? Better just shut up.
In fewer words: “Be the change you want to see in the world.” — not Gandhi.
Oh, because it may be funny to me and my friends, but someone who doesn't know me could be offended and get the wrong idea. A common example. I'm an air head, always forgetting stuff. I will joke that this would be more expected if I was a platinum blond with a big bosom... playing into the 'dumb blonde' stereotype.
I'm inclined to think that having ethnic ingroup/outgroup preferences is a basic human thing, but dividing people into large groups based on skin color is a fairly modern invention.
Yeah, I sorta see ingroup/ outgroup as 'thinking fast' with our brain. And to move above that is to 'think slowly'. But we don't always do that (think slowly) And in fact to 'think slowly' all the time is not how we are built. Maybe we need to distinguish 'fast thinking' racism from 'slow thinking' racism. It seems much more complicated to me than, so and so is a racist.
> Stated like that, it seems obvious to me that racism should be considered like a disease, much more than a moral failing.
> And that is a very non-woke position!
I think that the 'official' woke position is to consider it a disease, but to consider anyone who doesn't adopt the woke ideology as someone who refuses treatment. So in their view, they are not attacking people for being racist, but for not wanting to do anything about it.
But of course in practice this distinction is often not made this way. It's part of a common pattern where the ideological underpinnings often get ignored when they clash with the desires of the believers. And of course, they can always just claim that the person is not working hard enough to eradicate their racism, to justify an attack.
"I’m interested in the community’s opinion: would you go to an in-person indoors ACX meetup in ~September? Would you consider it irresponsible to hold one? "
I would not go (but I wouldn't be going even without Covid). I would not consider it irresponsible to hold one.
How about treating the SSC community like adults, advertise the meetings if anyone wants to host, add a line mentioning that Covid is still a thing and letting folks decide for themselves?
In general, I am okay (up to a point, but a fairly tolerant point) with letting people make decisions about their own lives even if I think it is a mistake. I'm even okay shouldering some externalities to enable this, hoping that folks return the favor if I want to take different risks than they do.
Even if you respect people's right to freely make decisions knowing what decisions they're inclined to make can make your life a lot easier. In this case, Scott doesn't want to go to all the effort of organizing and advertising meetups if nobody's going to go anyway.
To expand on Paul's comment, it's also helpful to know why people are inclined to various decisions. "I'm not interested in going because the time doesn't work for me" is different from "I'm not going because I don't enjoy social gatherings" is different from "I'm not going because I'm nervous about COVID". As an organizer, you get different information and feedback from each response, and there are usually things you can improve at low cost (for example, if a lot of people say they can't go on a saturday, you could probably move it to a sunday without much issue and get more people to show up. Especially if you are indifferent towards saturday vs sunday, that's a low cost way of getting a better meetup)
On the situation in Germany: social gatherings have restrictions, mostly based on current case numbers (defined as pos cases in the last week per 100k residents), with the highest mode of restrictions at 50 cases / week / 100k (currently at 13 and rising) limiting gatherings to 5 persons from two households, but not counting fully vaccinated or confirmed recovered.
Larger group gatherings have additional rules, but in theory, it should be possible to hold a 100-person gathering of fully vaccinated if enough space is available. Still a bit risky (assuming you really manage all rules correctly) and honestly speaking, waiting for next spring might be the way easier option.
I would not normally go to any ACX meetup; it's just not my crowd. However, in the current pandemic situation, I would not go to a meetup even if you paid me. I do consider holding one irresponsible.
You've over-intellectualized the issue. When you have something people want they lie to you. Lies are bad because they don't allow you to correctly model the world. This in turn leads to bad outcomes long term.
Imagine a king. He has power so everyone lies to him about their loyalty and faith and efficiency. And then he finds he's got nobody loyal to him or faithful or efficient and he loses his throne. Imagine an attractive woman. She has looks and social grace so people lie about to her about how intelligent she is or how interesting or how much they love her. And then she finds she's not as smart or loved as she thought and ends up alone once her looks fade.
And so on and so forth. It is a real problem and one that people have a great deal of difficulty solving. One of the benefits of not mattering is that people have no incentive to lie and so many will, on balance, be truthful. But once you have anything they want they have a strong incentive to lie. Many do not resist that.
That's why Mother Nature and Papa Natural Selection have largely solved it for us. Almost everybody is born wired up with something that we often call a conscience but which in any case makes it difficult to lie fluently to people with whom you have strong social connections (and even to strangers, to some extent). For the most part, only psychopaths (who are rare) can lie easily and fluently to everyone. Most of us turn red, look at our feet, stammer, and give off about ten thousand tells that are relatively easily detected.
No doubt there are plenty of people who think this is all a result of solid child-rearing, sturdy social mythology, excellent primary schooling et cetera but I don't think so, I think it's in the DNA, and for the simple reason you point out: that the consequences of fluent lying in a species as social as ours are sufficiently disastrous that any subpopulation which lacked inborn "consciences" was wiped out long ago.
Which is why nobody is ever deceived by the people close to them, infidelity is all but unheard of, etc.
Seriously that take is simplistic and proves far too much. Flattery and sucking up to higher status people is one of the core human behaviors. It's usually only minor amounts of deliberate conscious deception, with the bulk made up of focusing on the positives while deemphasizing negatives, and of course self-deception: your conscience can't keep you from fooling someone else if you've already fooled yourself.
I think you are taking what I suggest to an extreme I didn't intend, and so the oversimplificaiton is yours, not mine.
The fact that people are born with a wired-in "conscience" that makes it *hard* to lie to people close to them doesn't mean it's *impossible* -- that they can never do so. Nature generally doesn't work in the black-and-white terms we might see in a computer program, she works in competing general tendencies and pressures.
Id est, the conscience makes it much harder to lie to your friends and family, but of course it doesn't make it *impossible* -- and so, therefore, people sometimes do. Sometimes in fact it's a good or at least necessary thing to do. But note that it *is* difficult, and most people need powerful supportive reasons to overcome "conscience." Most people find it difficult to be unfaithful and lie about it to their partners, and that is while deception by people close to you, or infidelity, are not "unheard of" but they are much less common than if people had zero instinctual internal aversions to them.
A worrying hypothesis: Azathoth seems to have also provided us with a mechanism for coming to believe our own self-serving lies in order to better deceive others. Simler writes about one aspect of that here - https://meltingasphalt.com/crony-beliefs/ - and Franklin in relation to religions here - https://thefutureprimaeval.tumblr.com/post/130867775523/sanity-for-sociality-a-theory-of-religion . I haven't read Hanson and Simler's book The Elephant In The Brain yet, but if you're interested in blackpills on the question, I gather that that's the place to look.
"You’re going to fail in your dream to become a great cosmologist, have a less colourful life than most people, and spend a lot of time at church."
That may or may not be true for Mormons, which is the example he is using in that piece, but why does he think a Mormon couldn't study cosmology? I think his assumptions there are "Well, cosmology is part of Science, and once a Mormon or any other believer encounters Science, *plainly* their irrational beliefs cannot hold in the face of that! So you stop believing, and go on to cosmology, but lose the benefits of the strong social bonds that I am touting".
Given that the originator of the Big Bang Theory was a Belgian priest, and that the Vatican Observatory seems to be happily tootling along, I don't know if cosmology and religious belief are as incompatible as he thinks:
I suspect that the Catholic Church just is much more compatible with modern cosmology than the LDS Church, simply on the basis of the Mormons having made some specific empirically falsifiable outer-space-related claims in the 19th Century that the Catholics don't make - but I can't claim to be particularly well versed. I don't know if Tracing Woodgrains can give us any detail?
Are you suggesting that the Catholic Church never made any empirically falisfiable claims about the nature of outer space? Really? Admittedly it was earlier, but then the Catholics have a pretty serious first-mover advantage on the Mormons.
Brigham Young University is a very strongly LDS university, and they have no problems whatsoever managing to have a reasonable Physics department, as well as an outstanding Computer Science department. (Not a physicist, so can't really comment on the strength of their Physics department.)
I guess you're talking about Kolob or maybe Brigham Young's thinking that maybe dinosaur bones are from other planets when God collected the "matter" to make ours? There are some odd ideas, but nothing that out there, and nothing that's really part of the core theology that would be a problem.
I'm an active, temple-going Latter-day Saint, son of a BYU Religion professor, and I also own 4 telescopes of varying capabilities and love learning about space and time. Anecdotal, I know, but I PERSONALLY feel I'm pretty well versed in both LDS theology and cosmology, and I don't find a conflict. Mormons do good work in paleontology as well.
Simler seems to ignore the fact that people can and do lie about their beliefs. I can ignore the incompetence of the boss's nephew while being aware of it; if I choose to thank him for his contributions to the project, giving some examples, the fault is mine if my sarcasm is evident or the attested contributions were obviously useless or not his. What I say is not necessarily what I believe.
Okay, Franklin goes even further and suggests it's hard to pretend enough to be a Mormon without being a true believer. Maybe that's true for some people, maybe that's true for Mormonism. I don't think is is true generally.
I am pretty honest about my beliefs as a rule, but I find it perfectly easy to shut up when it is useful.
I don't think either of them are making the claim that people *never* consciously lie about their beliefs, just that lying takes more cognitive effort than relaying what you believe to be true, and that there is therefore a *selective advantage* in being able to internalise a self-serving falsehood in a way that bypasses the conscious mind.
Well, the general problem is that "lie" is in some cases just a pejorative way to describe "dream" or "inspirational vision," or if you prefer the latter two are just in some cases glowing ways to describe "false and destructive delusion."
In all of these cases, what we're describing is a depiction of reality (or potential reality) which is contrary to facts already known (to speaker or listener), or which can be reasonably inferred. But whether we call this a "lie" or "a beautiful inspiring hope" (or even just "a necessary simplification") is a very subjective thing, and different people are quite capable of coming to radically different judgments about it.
But a priori that tells us that Nature can't make us *incapable* of lying, because sometimes "lying" (= telling people hopeful but empirically dubious dreams of the future) can have a powerfully positive effect on group survival. So she has to balance the good that can come from telling others tales with the bad that can also come from it. That, I assume, is why we have all these wired-in instincts about when saying things that aren't known to be factually true is OK and when it is not, and we struggle with cases on the borderline, both as individuals and as a society.
Although that explanation is attractive, I prefer not to be a sucker for biobehavioral just-so stories. Questions that immediately come to mind: (1) if there is a genetic basis for sociopathy, can we see different levels across different populations?; (2) do we see lower levels of sociopathy in cultures with large extended families?; (3) if there is genetic basis do we see any alleles in the human genome that have a high correlation for this behavior? Considering that we naturally form social hierarchies (even hunter gatherer societies have some social ranking), it would seem that lying without detection would offer all sorts of survival advantages. But various psychological studies have proved our individual theory of mind is not very effective in reading other people. Even if people don't lie effectively, most people aren't very good on picking up those lies.
"Of course, one paradox that might arise from these dynamics is that we should expect writers to get worse as they get more famous—insofar as they end up attracting more performativity on the part of their subjects."
Are you referring to non-fiction writers? Because there is the phenomenon of "too big to edit" - once a writer becomes a reliable cash cow for their publisher, there is a reluctance to do anything that might drive them away into the arms of another, rival, publisher, and part of that is the writer insisting on their way when it comes to editing their books.
Stephen King and J.K. Rowling are two examples of "the bigger the got, the more bloated their books got". From this Guardian article of 2011 lamenting the lost art of editing:
"One freelance editor I talked to remarked that "big companies used to have whole copy-editing and proof-reading departments. Now you'll get one publisher and one editor running a whole imprint." She'd noticed that some editors tended to acquire books that arrived in a more or less complete state. From her own experience, she also noted that writers at the beginning of their careers were far more open to suggestions than those further down the line; one suspects that that must always have been the case, but it's her opinion that writers with a healthy sales history have become more powerful, and their editors less. "It's certainly easy to imagine that writers with a lot of financial clout – whether literary prizewinners or mass-market bestsellers – feel that they have gained immunity from having their work tinkered with."
His more recent work is better, if not quite as good as when he was at his peak. There was definitely a period when he just ran rampant with length - it started with "The Stand" which really should have been a trilogy due to its length, number of characters, and intertwining plot lines. He wanted it as one book, though, and when he had the clout he issued the "Director's Cut", so to speak, adding in *more* material:
"In 1990, The Stand was reprinted as a Complete and Uncut Edition. King restored over 400 pages from texts that were initially reduced from his original manuscript, revised the order of the chapters, shifted the novel's setting from 1980 to 10 years forward, and accordingly corrected a number of cultural references. The Complete and Uncut Edition of The Stand is considered to be King's longest stand-alone work with its 1,152 pages, surpassing King's 1,138-page novel It."
"It" was another door-stopper but held together better, due to the two main chronological divisions of first the story with the characters as children, then as adults. It could certainly have been trimmed down more, but it was at the limit of what he could do.
Then he really got into the swing of it with the Dark Tower series; I grimly ploughed my way through the later volumes because I wanted to see how the story ended, but my God, those books should have been edited with a chainsaw! Bloated, over-stuffed, meandering, and by the time you got to the end you had forgotten where the start was.
I actually quite enjoyed the uncut "Stand", but doorstoppers are a known weakness of mine. I think that the main issue with writers who have become "uneditable" is that many of them could benefit from editing. (I'm looking at GRRM here.)
Yeah, it's the whole "kill your darlings" bit. Authors do get enamoured of their own work, and feel that they have cut every bit they needed, and any changes you want are going to ruin the work.
Particularly when they're Big Names with a track record of being "and I am your most profitable author for the past twenty years, I think I know how to write a best-selling book by now". When they start demanding 'creative control', as it were, it's hard for the publisher to say "no" because they're fully aware Big Name Author can just walk out the door and have all their rivals in a bidding war to sign them up.
I've read up to "Gwendy's Button Box" which came out in 2017. I've hummed and hawed about the detective ones, the Bill Hodges Trilogy and haven't started them yet.
I liked "Doctor Sleep" which was the sequel to "The Shining". I thought that a sequel could have been a terrible mess, but on the whole, I think King handled it well. It doesn't have the same manic intensity as "The Shining" but that is as much down to King being older and having gone through a lot more since he wrote the original.
"Revival" in a way is classic King, but the more cynical, hopeless King. Generally he has some kind of way out or at least beneficent force opposing the malevolence, but this one is pure nihilism all the way. I don't know if I'd recommend it, unless you can handle "and the ending makes H.P. Lovecraft's view of the universe look like 'My Little Pony'".
He does seem to have gone through a period where his later writing was "the universe is actively cruel and hates humanity and wants to make us suffer, and all the gods and angels and fairytales we tell ourselves about goodness and heaven are just that - fairytales that will crumble in the face of the evil and cruel reality". He's come back from that a bit, I think.
As in "Gwendy's Button Box", which ends very *nicely* for a King story. I kept expecting him to drop the other shoe and have Horrible Things happen to the main character, but no. Maybe because he co-wrote it with someone else?
The ones since 2017 I haven't bothered with, since they sounded like re-treads of short stories or other novels he had already written. I might change my mind on one or two of them; I'm waiting for the new one, "Billy Summers", that is coming out soon.
Joyland was a solid horror/ghost story. Possibly of interest here because it also has a lot about the business of carnivals, especially the booths for winning prizes.
It's said that the reason John Steinbeck's later novels are so poor is because he'd turn in the first drafts. Why bother to do more work? They'd get just as published and sell just as many copies without it.
The worst example of this phenomenon that I've ever seen is *Atlas Shrugged*. Rand, as I understand, was able at that point in her career to demand that editors keep their grubby paws off her masterpiece, and as a result a book that could have been a work of deep, dark, depraved genius is instead a bloated, self-indulgent monster.
What part of "Atlas Shrugged" would you have cut? The version of the story I heard was that Rand argued with the publisher about the edits they suggested, and actually convinced them they they would detract from the points she was making.
In the interest of fair disclosure, I really liked AS, reading it in one sitting after I had purchased it. Admittedly, I didn't get much else done that day... Come to think of it, I did the same thing with "The Stand", referenced above.
I'm somewhat amazed at the speeds with which people read here on ACX. I've been Atlas Shrugged twice in my life, and never managed to complete it either time. Because of the length. I've tried speed reading a couple of times, but I just end up missing important points, so I go back to reading at snail pace
I've never been able to read "Atlas Shrugged" not because of the length, but because any time I've dipped into it, I wanted to slap all the characters. There are books I've hate-read because even though I disliked the characters/setting, I wanted them all to get what was coming to them and wanted to see if the author would do that, but Rand's "heroes" and "heroine" are so dislikeable, I can't even do that.
That's completely separate from her political/philosophical point of view, which of course will have an effect on how her characters think and behave, but the characters as they stand are not appealing to me.
> What part of "Atlas Shrugged" would you have cut?
For starters, about two thirds of the literally dozens of functionally identical monologues and speeches.
I'm okay with characters making speeches - for example, I love *Les Miserables*, which is full of them. But in LM it's *different* speeches from characters with different points of view, which aren't ours or the author's. In *Atlas Shrugged* it's always an authorial mouthpiece doing the same tedious rambling.
I'd have cut most of John Galt's infamous speech, and really most of John Galt. The story is much better when he's not on stage, including the parts where he's an interesting and mysterious figure in the background. When he shows up, it's a disappointment - and I think a big part of that is the author falling in love with her darling. She's much better with, well, pretty much all of the other characters in that tale.
Amusing to me, as it was reading "The Speech" online that convinced me to immediately to the store and buy a copy of the book, which I then sat down and read straight through. :-P
I think that the critical thing to remember about Atlas Shrugged is that it's a BDSM romance novel disguised as a philosophical thriller. *50 Shades of Gold*, or some such.
There's one thing I'd like which would make Atlas Shrugged a little longer. What did John Galt and Fred Kinnan (the union leader) say to each other? The first time I read AS, I went back and forth over the pages because I thought I'd missed a section.
I've never read it, but if a novel's success is to be calculated in terms of devoted fans, she probably did something right.
I suppose there is probably an element in all these cases that people who really like the writer probably prefer a work that is a little longer and less edited than the mass of those who respect them.
I like long books. I feel like I'm getting my money's worth. I re-read Atlas Shrugged earlier this year. I liked it when I was in my early 20s, and I wondered if it would hold up. It's actually still not bad. Definitely a polemic, and I've grown out of a lot of the concepts, but it's not bad.
A much more egregious case would be the Wheel of Time, I think. It felt like Robert Jordan just gave up on editing at all once the series was selling well.
Yeah my two favorite examples will be Heinlein and Michener, "Double Star" is a beautiful tight Shakespearean tragedy/ romance. And "Tales of the South Pacific" a gem. They both got verbose with age. And yet I still enjoy the rambling tomes, and to be honest I mostly would like them to go on forever... I sometimes feel a little sad when I'm getting near the end of a book. "I need to slow down and savor this before it's over."
I remember a couple of things from it fondly. One is the framing device-- there's a tel, a hill that's the result of layers of stuff people built in a place. Archaeologists dig a trench, and Michener writes a long chapter about people associated with an object from each era.
The other is a local family which is there for the whole extended timeline, and which converts to whichever religion is convenient.
It was the framing device that really did it for me, that metaphor for how culture accretes slowly over time. It helped me to connect the history I was reading to the current state of play.
Interesting essay. But I wish you had provided some links to Grant's studies — and some quotes from Foucault, too. I'm sure I can dig them out myself, but, at least in my case, laziness obscures my perception (I don't have time for another Internet rabbit hole right now).
I'm a fan of an alternative take, that power and wealth disincentivizes people to concern themselves with others. You start needing people less the more you can depend on your capital.
Re meetups - the NYC rationalist community has been having in-person meetups again for a few months now (I know there's been some people here who've expressed interest).
Just note you're coming from the ACX open thread in the mailing list "application" box and I'll accept you. I promise we're not intimidating and you're all welcome, we're just bad about making the join process more welcoming and clear that we don't have application standards and any real person vaguely familiar with the community is welcome.
Unfortunately I'm not sure there's anybody in the group who would do substantially more/better organizing work if we were offered money.
I use this site to sometimes mention my podcast. I hope people don't mind. Anyway the latest was on Sumo with Kenji Tierney (he has such a nice voice!) I found it really interesting - he went into the history and comes at it as an anthropologist. Was startled to find that when the Japanese wanted to impress Perry they put on a Sumo exhibition (which had the exact opposite effect that they wanted - naked men - how barbaric!) and Perry had some of his men black up and put on a minstrel show.
TL;DR: The FDA is 5X too worried about long term credibility
There's been a debate about how soon the FDA should fully approve the mRNA vaccines. Critics like Matthew Yglesias and Eric Topol argue that full approval could be very beneficial because it opens the door to more mandates and allows advertising. Defenders of the FDA say the critics aren't thinking about the long term. If safety issues emerge after full approval, the defenders claim, the credibility of the FDA would be shot for years, driving fewer vaccinations in the long term.
The FDA's concerns about long term credibility seems hand-wavy and non-quantitative, so I decided to do some some back-of-the-envelope math to see how much it actually matters. With some reasonable assumptions that are quite favorable to the FDA, I estimate that they are 5X too worried about long term credibility. Even after accounting for long term risk, faster approval could give us 40 million vaccinated person-years over the long term, which could save over 100,000 lives.
The crux of the issue is this: The FDA worries about the unlikely scenario where safety issues emerge after approval of the 2021 vaccine, driving long term vaccine reluctance. That's fair, but that's mostly true *regardless* of whether the 2021 vaccine got full approval or an EUA. More details in my post linked to below.
I encourage anyone to question any of my assumptions!
The FDA is trying to be too clever by half. You can't tell the entire country that it's super, super important to get vaccinated, and then hedge your bets by claiming "we never really approved it" if something goes wrong. In the minds of the people, this vaccine has an official imprimatur, and the FDA should stop beating around the bush.
Is the *FDA* telling the entire country that it's super, super important to get vaccinated? Almost everything I've heard on that has been from the CDC, from elements of the executive branch above the FDA/CDC level, and from the usual range of non-governmental thinkfluencers. Maybe I've missed the FDA's push in all the noise, which is quite possible, but it's also possible that they're just doing the same "just say no!" thing that's been working for them since 1957.
FWIW the FDA’s acting commissioner Dr. Janet Woodcock is quoted as saying, “Getting more of our population vaccinated is critical to moving forward and past this pandemic.”
The FDA is not supposed to say that it is super super important to get vaccinated. What they are saying with EUA that the vaccine has good data about efficacy and safety but we still want to know more. The importance of vaccination is between doctors and recipients. The FDA are like guardians between drug companies and public. The former wants to sell as many drugs as possible to people and the later wants to buy them as many as possible. The FDA is a filter that is supposed to let only good ones through. With the EUA the drug is allowed to be sold and administered but there is a label that information about the drug is not complete and may change. It reflects the true state of things but does not prevent getting the drug to those who want it.
Just be straight up about it. "This is new tech, we've examined it to the extent we can, we are pretty sure at this point that a major problem coming from left field is unlikely, though obviously we can't guarantee it." People who don't trust them still won't trust them, but they didn't before either.
Is the FDA actually mandated to consider the long-term policy effects of its decisions as well as making a best-information estimate of whether a drug can be safely used? This would seem highly contradictory in terms of purpose, and importantly seems to involve a regulatory agency taking a political decision (do we do this thing if the consequences might be X?). If the FDA is expected to take decisions on behalf of the executive and Congress (who should be making federal political decisions) then that might explain a lot of its issues. It would certainly explain risk aversion around vaccines as a bureaucratic response to risk is almost always to create an imperfect solution that doesn't commit to doing anything.
There's a book that I often recommend on how bureaucracies work, fittingly named "Bureaucracy," by James Q. Wilson. Without getting into the details, I don't think it makes sense to talk about monitoring or rejecting incentives for decisions, since it's not visible, and can't be challenged in a way that's useful. What they can do instead to assert more control is mandate stricter processes for decision making - which is a complete disaster, and created the current mess. So it seems that more oversight isn't going to fix this - to address the problem, we'd need to change the incentives for the organization, and for the leaders and workers at the FDA.
As someone whose paycheck is based on occupying a bureaucratic role, I'd agree with that point, but I'd still emphasise that the responsibility for the mess is not in general the bureaucrats' (excepting any empire builders or activists) but the politicians who happily let the FDA and it's many equivalents make political decisions for them.
...or the public's, for demanding types of bureaucratic control and conflicting incentives that make this type of conflict nearly inevitable, or the bureaucrats, for being unwilling to buck their described mandates to do the best thing at some risk to their careers, or...
In fact, moral mazes are the way they are because that is the nature of the type of system we build, not really because of any individual or group.
Humans exist in a universe with millions of conflicting incentives and costs and benefits and superstitions and errors. Not only that but each of those things changes from moment to moment ... and person to person.
Maybe once size fits all bureaucratic solutions with perverse feedback loops is doomed to fail. We should look for decentralized solutions: individual liberty, Constitutionally Limited Republic.
The Constitution isn't perfect, but it's better than what we have now.
You seem to be assuming that making vaccination mandatory is a good thing. IMO once everyone who wants a vaccine can get it, coercive measures against COVID are no longer justified. To vaccinated people, COVID is not riskless, but it's no longer an exceptionally dangerous disease that justifies exceptional measures.
Because currently we have a situation where most adults are vaccinated, there will be strong pressure to drop all precautions, but vaccines for kids are not available yet... so the likely outcome is my child getting covid because some classmate's antivaxer parents will do the most dangerous things just to demonstrate that they can.
After the kids are vaccinated, let the natural selection act on the antivaxers.
For most of them, not all of them, and those of us who are parents do not know which bin our kids will fall into if infected. I'm not going to do _everything_ I possibly can to keep my son from getting infected (if, indeed, he hasn't been already, none of us have been regularly testing) but I would like to use all reasonable measures to keep him healthy.
Incidentally, to the extent that practices other than the vaccine like masking & hand washing reduce the chances of COVID transmission, they are proportionately more effective against the flu, to the extent that positive flu tests in the US dropped by two orders of magnitude this past winter. I wrote about this in the comments on Scott's rather labored Les Mis parody.
"to the extent that positive flu tests in the US dropped by two orders of magnitude this past winter"
Heh, what's the opposite of "I revise & extend my remarks"? I put this better the first time. We can't parse how much of this reduction in flu transmission stems from distancing, which we won't and shouldn't maintain in such a stringent fashion, and masks & handwashing, which are damn near a free lunch, but I would like to find out.
The flu isn't dangerous "For most of them, not all of them, and those of us who are parents do not know which bin our kids will fall into if infected. "
I believe more people have died from the Covid vaccine than children have died from Covid.
Will you be mandating flu vaccines because the numbers of children dying from each are about the same.
What matters is that COVID's risk to children is low enough that we don't usually support intrusive measures to prevent risks this small. (A statistic I've found: 340 minors in the US have died from COVID in 2020 and 2021, while 51213 minors died in total during the same period. https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/covid_weekly/index.htm#SexAndAge Do you pay proportionate attention to all other causes of death?)
This isn't changed if the risk is actually large to a very small fraction of children. Let's say that 0.002% of the children who catch COVID die. That could be because any child who catches it has a 0.002% probability of dying. Or it could be because 0.01% of the children have a 10% probability of dying, and 99.99% have a 0.001% probability of dying. In the latter case, not all children have a low risk; but on aggregate, the risk to children is the same as in the former case, and no more intrusive measures are justified than in the former case.
"IMO once everyone who wants a vaccine can get it, coercive measures against COVID are no longer justified."
That would definitely be true if the vaccine gave perfect immunity with no chance of breakthrough infection. But if it's like drunk driving, where the person who is doing it bears most, but *not all*, of the risk, then it's reasonable that some amount of coercive measures be employed. (It depends on just how big that fraction of risk that others bear is - is it more like drunk driving, or like second hand smoke, or like something else?)
All sorts of diseases carry some risk to others, the flu being the most obvious parallel but we don't use similar measures against them.
Lockdowns, curfews, limits on gatherings are exceptional restrictions on liberty; so is the mandatory vaccination of adults (whether literally compulsory, or required for ordinary activities like going to a restaurant). I'm not one of those who categorically say that a disease like COVID can't justify extraordinary measures. However, only an especially dangerous disease justifies exceptional measures, a mild or moderately severe respiratory infection doesn't—in my opinion, and pretty much everyone's, prior to COVID. And that COVID was an exceptionally dangerous infection prior to vaccination doesn't mean we should continue treating it as exceptionally important to prevent even after the vaccination campaign is mostly complete.
This sounds a lot more like they had a position (don't approve) and came up with arguments to defend it. I don't think they actually care one iota about long term credibility, I think they care about not having to do anything outside of what the rules-as-written say to do.
> Assuming that 0.3% of unvaccinated people will die each year because they are not vaccinated
How is this calculated? What does it assume about what fraction of the unvaccinated people will catch COVID each year, and on what basis? What does it assume about the age distribution of the unvaccinated people? What does it assume about the fraction of unvaccinated people who have already got COVID, and about how much a previous infection protects against new infection (specifically, a fatal one)?
All your questions are valid, but I'd wager my estimate is accurate within 0.5x and 2.0x, and also not critical to the main conclusion of the post, which is presented in units of vaccinated person-days.
You seem to be assuming that every unvaccinated person will be infected with COVID, and then infected *again* every year, and that each of these subsequent infections will be as deadly as the first. Or do I misunderstand what you mean by "0.3% will die each year"?
That's a good point. I've shaved it down to 0.2% based on the reinfection dynamics you mentioned, and because older people are more likely to be vaccinated, as Clive F mentioned below.
Your comment makes me realize something else though. To the extent that previous infection will protect the population in coming years, the long term (as well as concerns about long-term credibility) becomes somewhat less important. Not a claim I'd hang my hat on, but still interesting to think about.
If I'm remembering what I've read about the Spanish flu rightly, it was an unusual disease in that it affected young people much more strongly than old people, and that the best theory to explain this is that a previous strain of flu had been similar enough to the Spanish flu strain that elderly people's immune systems had a good chance to recognize and fight off the more virulent strain more effectively.
The dynamics of reinfection are, to my mind, one of the most interesting questions about COVID-19. I'm not sure how comparable coronaviruses and flu viruses are in terms of how much the underlying pathogen changes over the course of a given year or how well immunity to one strain confers immunity to related strains. COVID will become a manageable disease, but are we talking more like tetanus, where the vaccine is just something you get every 5 to 10 years and you're fine, or like the flu, where pharmaceutical companies are making their best guess on each year's edition which in turn affects the load that hospitals & clinics have to carry that winter, or something else entirely?
I don't think you can just average the age-segmented rates: you'd need to account for the fact that those most at risk are most inclined to get vaccinated.
So in the UK we see vaccination rates above 90% for those most at risk (age >60), and down around 30-50% for younger, less at risk, groups (20-40). Although those will also likely go up over time, looking at the S-curves of growth it looks like the younger groups will top out around 60-70%.
You would also need to model the shrinking size of the uninfected population, as more people get it (and get natural immunity) but don't die. You may be doing this already, but it wasn't clear in your post.
I suppose over time we might also see different breakthrough rates of infection in those already vaccinated, but that isn't evident yet.
that's not just inclination, that's the fact that old people have been able to get the vaccine for longer. Many 20somethings haven't had a chance to get their second vaccine yet.
From another discussion I've seen on DSL or ACX, the aducanumab case isn't that clear. The FDA is supposed to decide based on safety relative to the benefit. Aducanumab has likely little to no benefit, but it is also very safe, so they approved it. The issue is that once it's approved, Medicare probably has to pay for it if a doctor prescribes it.
Reasonably it should be a separate decision whether a drug is legal to buy at all* (which should only depend on being safe in relation to the expected benefits) and whether insurers are expected to pay for it (which should also depend on costs-to-benefits); just because there is a low chance it's effective it shouldn't be illegal to buy if you have all the money to burn. (All of this is what others have said in that discussion; I'm not all that familiar with the American healthcare system.)
*: or not strongly advised against, for libertarians
Approving the vaccines faster *because it is politically or socially convenient* is exactly the kind of thing which the FDA should never do. That way lies disaster, this would hardly be the first or last time approval or non-approval would have powerful social effects, and if the FDA were to make decisions based on that criteria, it would just open the floodgates to massive lobbying and political pressure, and the organization would be debased and forced into service to grubby tribalism in the way the Supreme Court has been over the past 50 years.
So far as I can tell, they are applying the same criteria for ultimate approval they use for any other vaccine -- which takes years, in general. That's exactly what they should do.
I doubt that approval had anything to do with political convenience. I think it was driven by the fact that there are *no* effective treatments for Alzheimer's at all, and they probably hoped it would turn out better than nothing, if only by some tiny amount that wasn't obvious in the trials. That is, I doubt it would have been approved had there been any existing standard of care.
That doesn't mean it was the right decision, of course, but I think the forces at work here had much more to do with the (lack of) existing treatment regime than political considerations.
Yeah, I misspoke. Audhelm wasn’t politically convenient. It might have been partially by corruption or donors or because the fda higher ups were good friends with the company combined with that though
Reading an article about it, I don't think it was politically convenient and the decision seems to have caused upheaval in the FDA itself, as well as the drug company doing it best - by slapping a huge price on the treatment - to make sure that only a tiny set of potential patients will ever get it.
So I suppose the cynical view is that this is not about Alzheimer's (since even if the drug is useless, the patients are elderly and likely to die soon anyway, so no real bad effects there) but it does set a precedent about "Accelerated Approval" that perhaps some within the FDA would like to happen, given the amount of complaints about "why don't the FDA permit drugs approved in Europe to be prescribed here? why do they make drug companies carry out such long and expensive tests? why can't people decide for themselves if they want to try a new drug?".
"In the wake of the drug’s approval, three members of the FDA’s advisory committee resigned from their posts, with one writing in his resignation letter that the FDA’s authorisation “made a mockery of the committee’s consultative process”. Back in November, the advisory panel voted almost unanimously against the approval of aducanumab, known commercially as Aduhelm, with ten voting against, one abstaining and none voting in favour.
...As well as concerns about aducanumab’s efficacy, Biogen has come under fire for the steep price attached to the new treatment. While drug pricing watchdog ICER determined that a fair cost for a therapy with such limited evidence of efficacy would fall between $2,500 and $8,300, Biogen has slapped an eye-watering $56,000-per-year price tag on the drug.
ICER said in a statement: “Our report notes that only a hypothetical drug that halts dementia entirely would merit this pricing level. The evidence on aducanumab suggests that, at best, the drug is not nearly this effective.
“At this price the drug maker would stand to receive well in excess of $50bn per year even while waiting for evidence to confirm that patients receive actual benefits from treatment.”
Even advocates for the drug have slammed Biogen over the drug’s price. The Alzheimer’s Association called the cost “simply unacceptable”, and said it “will pose an insurmountable barrier to access, it complicates and jeopardises sustainable access to this treatment, and may further deepen issues of health equity”."
That falls under "socially convenient," so no, they should not do that either. The FDA has no mandate to ponder appropriate public health measures, their job is (or should be) limited to saying whether Drug X works or doesn't work. The question of whether Drug X should be mandated, optional, or forbidden is a question for regulators at (in my opinion, and notwithstanding Raich v. Gonzales) the state level.
To the extent there is any Federal agency with a mandate to recommend public health measures, that would be the CDC, and in general I don't think public health is primarily a Federal responsibility at all -- you'll note the Constitution is silent on this point -- and is properly within the ambit of state and sometimes local government.
I'm not a fan of protean Federal agencies where whichever is convenient at the moment is imbued with the full powers of government. I like having strict and precisely-defined missions for Federal agencies and having them stay within those missions. If the missions need to be changed -- if the voting public wants FEMA and the FDA to turn into first responders, say -- then the right thing to do is for Congress to rewrite their enabling legislation, after a considerable open debate and preferably the intervention of an election or two so the voters can give their opinion, too.
What Carl says, mostly. The FDA has sixty years of history not approving drugs faster because it is good for public health, and they clearly don't see it as being their job to approve drugs faster because it's good for public health. And if they are in any way wrong about that, Congress has had sixty years to change the law making it clear what the FDA is supposed to be doing.
The FDA's job is to classify drugs, vaccines, etc, as one of "not shown to be safe and effective", "probably effective and not horribly dangerous", and "proven effective and very very very safe", according to objective criteria. I'd prefer they have a broader range of options to chose from, but I think that would be up to Congress. Maybe I'd prefer they quietly take a "very" or two off that last option on their own initiative.
But, within the options allowed to them by law, they have properly given Pfizer, Moderna, and J&J the "probably effective and not horribly dangerous" Emergency Use Authorization and are holding back on the full "proven effective and very (very very) safe" Approval until they have the usual amount of data for that.
What to do with a vaccine that has only, and properly, an Emergency Use Authorization, is for the CDC and Congress and the various State governments to decide.
It’s not “worry about long term credibility” lmao. It’s their process, and about the power of people involved.
If it was about credibility, they wouldn’t have approved audhelm. Approval vs emergency approval will not affect their long term credibility at all for the vaccine seeing as most who are gonna take it have.
FDA is like police. They don't care about their credibility because you have to obey them regardless. Nevertheless, I think they dropped the ball with aducanumab because they approved it with expectation that it may prove more useful in the future. It is not their mandate to be involved in issues like that. It is like police not arresting young criminals because they believe that they may grow up and stop doing crime. Surely, sometimes jailing young offenders makes them only worse. But you still have to arrest them and let the courts decide what punishment or not they deserve.
Like all governmental organization FDA has its faults. And overreguation can be an issue. But there are too many shouting that FDA should be abolished without suggesting viable alternative.
I’m not ... criticizing the FDA here, the Aduhelm approval was clearly against their reputational interests, so it’s not like that’s bad. And I agree abolishing the FDA without a direct replacement that carried out all its existing functions better, including strictly regulating drugs and medical snake oil, is very very bad. And people who call for the abolition of the FDA do not ever come even close to a way to do that, and abolishing the FDA without that would harm millions of people and likely kill thousands. I didn’t mention overregularion though? Just that the FDA manages its reputation and political situation closely and in everything it does, and that’s integral to understanding how it came to be and what it is. I mean it wouldn’t have been founded without reputation, wouldn’t have had its scope expanded without reputation, would not now be the one of the most powerful regulatory agencies in America without its reputation and political maneuvering, etc.
If the FDA approved Aduhelm against their reputation interests, it means they care less about their reputation than we think. Of course, no one is absolute immune to bad reputation but I don't think that their decisions are particularly influenced by reputational risk. Reputation comes from doing their job honestly. The head of the FDA may be influenced by political decisions which means that their reputation among politicians is more important than among common people.
I just read the review of A history of the FDA and it's really interesting. Mostly it appears that FDA was blamed from everything but they did mostly right. Some genuine concerns about FDA policies (like making plan B prescription only) were overshadowed but populistic movements that did not understand science. The story about Laetril is so telling. It is not that FDA had a clear opinion about Latertil. It didn't grant IND because those people were quacks and could have harmed many people unnecessarily even during clinical trials.
They always had a chance to get their act together, resubmit the application and do useful studies. IND was later granted not without political interreference but there is always a gray area in controversial issues. The fact that Laetrile failed tells more about the activist groups than the FDA.
It seems that the FDA is the most science based authority that has to fight against all other groups.
Their power was initialted, enforced, expanded, and cemented by ... reputation. What makes congress pass such laws? What makes competing agencies and higher ups willing to grant power? What makes people willing to continue the agencies? What makes their agency not get overtaken? Reputation!
>It is like police not arresting young criminals because they believe that they may grow up and stop doing crime. Surely, sometimes jailing young offenders makes them only worse. But you still have to arrest them and let the courts decide what punishment or not they deserve.
At least at the federal level in the US, police and prosecutors do actually have that discretion. A judge cannot force the executive to bring a criminal case against someone.
(There is a good argument that prosecutorial discretion is too broad and ought to have more checks, but is =/= ought.)
Yes, but my point is that if someone does a serious crime and police does not arrest the offender, it will not look good. It is as if they openly encouraging and tolerating crime. The discretion sometimes is a good thing because sometimes crime is not crime, for example, using drugs is a crime in certain countries but should not be. Clearly, it was not meant to be an example of this.
Keep in mind that in most US jurisdictions, the DA is but a glorified politician.
Prosecuting bankers and jailing the wayward offspring of US Senators without fear or favor is not the way to win powerful friends who can boost your career, nor does it do much to assuage Solid Citizens' fears that you are protecting them from criminal elements.
EUA is specifically intended to facilitate monitoring and collection of data about possible side effects. It includes greater duty to report side effects. Other than that for doctors it makes no difference because they can legally prescribe and administer the drug. Maybe it has some subtle differences for insurers but I haven't see any issues with vaccines so far.
I don't see the reason to change the classification just because some antivax interpret that the EUA means it is a highly unreliable drug. They say EUA means experimental. It is just arguing about semantics because in a way all drugs are experimental. You never know what reaction a person will have and what will be the side effects.
Another issue I saw was that vaccines cannot be made mandatory, e.g., in military etc. until they are fully registered. That's not the problem of the FDA at all. They are only to ensure the safety and efficacy and EUA is appropriate when this data is somewhat lacking. It has no say whether the use of a drug should be made mandatory (e.g., for violent schizophrenics who have court ordered mandatory treatment etc.). If the government considers that the use of vaccine is so important and beneficial despite EUA status, they can mandate it without passing the responsibility to the FDA. In the given circumstances the FDA clearly intended the vaccine to be widely used practically by every adult. So, why not give it to all military people too, with rare exception when the doctor may not recommend getting vaccine to a particular individual.
I got AZ and honestly I am a little happier about getting jabbed with a genetically engineered virus that is at least a real virus, than having my RNA messaging hacked. Even though AZ has known nasty (if rare) side effects. Survivor's bias, maybe - I didn't get the side effects other than standard vaccination ones. But I'd sooner get injected with mRNA than with Aduhelm, and the FDA okayed that!
A curious preference, as the AZ vax has the *DNA* for the spike protein inside it, and (successfully integrated) viral DNA has a much better chance of having some long-term effects on cells than mRNA, which is normally degraded so quickly (minutes) that the BioNTech and Moderna crews had to make some funky modifications to it to make it last a bit longer.
Anyway, once the DNA is inserted into your genome, it gets translated to mRNA and hacks your protein synthesis pathways in the same way as the mRNA vaccines.
As I have studied a little bit of immunology at university, I can say that it is extremely complicated. It is the most complicated part of human organism and we are nowhere near to understand or control it. We are lucky that the vaccines work in a way that Jenner was lucky that his original cowpox virus vaccine was effective for smallpox and was not dangerous to humans. It actually is a quite rare coincidence that such virus that could be found and directly used for vaccinations exists.
We have pushed anti-covid vaccines to the limit, any stronger side effects and they could not be used. Make them a little bit weaker and they will not be efficient enough. It is only our luck that they happened to be just good enough and in fact researchers had many tries and many vaccines didn't pass this threshold.
This is something that researchers, regulators, health authorities and physicians realize and have to make complicated decisions to balance efficiency with potential side effects. The public mostly don't realize that they are hard decisions because we don't want to scare them away from vaccinations. People mostly think – vaccines, how wonderful, it's so easy, just go and get jabbed and don't worry about side effects, the risk is insignificant. Your individual risk is indeed very low but at the population level professionals see balancing on a razor's edge and pray that they work as hoped.
I have been noodling for awhile now on creative ways to reduce emissions from air travel. Here's a fun one: what if we had electric towplanes tow jet aircraft off the ground as a present-day towplane does a glider, and the jet engines kicked in only after takeoff?
Advantages:
-- An electric towplane might be more feasible than a medium/long-range electric passenger plane, because all it needs to do is get the towed plane off the ground, unhook the tow cable, and land again before recharging, so the batteries required would be relatively small.
-- Besides the fuel and emissions savings from not having to use jet engines for takeoff, it would also reduce noise and air pollution around airports.
-- Retrofitting existing planes to be towed might be cheaper than replacing them.
Possible obstacles:
-- A towed takeoff might be too rough and/or too unreliable compared to a powered takeoff.
-- Existing tow cable materials might not be strong enough to take the load of a large passenger jet.
-- Existing airframes of passenger jets might not withstand being towed into the air, and retrofitting them might be infeasible.
-- The towing process might be so aerodynamically inefficient as to cancel out the energy savings. (Disclaimer: I know next to nothing about aerodynamics or aircraft engineering).
This may be a stupid question, but if an electric engine is capable of getting both the towplane and the passenger plane off the ground, why not just put the electric engine in the passenger plane and cut out the middle-plane?
Energy density I would say. The best batteries technology we have, lithium ion, can at best achieve 1/50th of the energy per unit weight that kerosene can (according to figured from wikipedia, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_density). The OP's proposal is to use small batteries that would likely be drained after take-off, so the remainder of the journey is still done by the conventional jet engines of the towed plane.
It's just not possible to have a long range electric plane given current battery technology. You might say that you have access to the sun (at least during daytime) and there was indeed an experimental plane, the Solar Impulse, that went round the world on solar panels and batteries but it was considered an impressive feat, and only had a crew of two.
Of course. Since Nicholas suggested using the towplane for takeoff, I figured the same could be done with an electric engine, not to replace the jet engine, but to supplement it. A hybrid plane, as it were.
Just throwing this out there in case it inspires any better ideas, but if there was enough energy cost of hauling the batteries all the way up to cruise altitude (or along for the ride) you could maybe eject discarged battery packs inflight and have them glide themselves down to the nearest depot for reuse.
If the batteries are heavy enough to need ejecting, maybe it's a better idea just to have the plane hooked up to an extremely long power cable that drops off and retracts once the plane has gained sufficient speed for takeoff. Or maybe an electric launch rail?
I thought of the cable also, and the wireless variation where you use a microwave beam and rectenna. My guess is the cable required for all that power is too heavy and the beam too hard to direct precisely and too damaging if you don't.
Do we know that the takeoff phase of flight is responsible for so many more emissions than other phases that a complex and expensive multi-stage takeoff is a good next step to consider? I'm skeptical as planes aren't rockets, but would be interested in seeing some data.
...that, from eyeballing some charts, suggests that emissions from other phases would dwarf those from takeoff. It also seems to suggest that the cruise phase is on average so much longer than the takeoff and climbout phases (11x longer in the chart on page 11, which may be from a single flight rather than an average) that takeoff might not be the low hanging fruit even though it uses the highest thrust setting (per page 12, 100% during takeoff roll compared to 30% during approach).
Good point. I still think takeoff likely has disproportionate local effects on noise and air quality right by the airport, but the nonlocal effects like CO2 may not be so disproportionate.
For local effects, one thing that surprised me from that slide deck was the number of minutes per flight the planes spent sitting around idling with their engines on. That seems like a problem that could be fixed with better logistics software (if the impact turned out to be big enough to prioritize).
Looking the ICAO Aircraft Engine Emissions Dataset, which seems to be a big excel spreadsheet downloaded from https://www.easa.europa.eu/domains/environment/icao-aircraft-engine-emissions-databank, the relevant columns seem to be the four columns BZ, CA, CB, and CC (fuel flow in kilograms per second for engines at takeoff, climbout, approach and idle settings respectively) along with columns Q, R, S and T (hydrocarbon emission index in grams per kilogram for the engine at takeoff, climbout, approach and idle).
Looking at a couple of the biggest engines, it looks like idle is less efficient than higher settings (emitting in some cases over 100x more unburnt fuel at idle than at T/O setting) yet still burns a significant amount of fuel (for one big engine, 3 times as much at approach as at idle, and about 4x as much at takeoff as at approach).
(The earlier link I posted, to the slide deck, was based on sampling FDR data rather than the ICAO data set -- interestingly, the authors found that ICAO's data tend to slightly overestimate time-in-phase and fuel consumption.)
Turbofan engines are generally designed to operate optimally during cruise, then sized up to provide enough power during takeoff & climb; given that fuel is the primary variable cost to airlines, this is clear evidence that fuel consumption (and thereby emissions) is far more affected by cruising than transitions.
You're mostly missing that modern airplanes are busses. Whatever replacements/improvement companies do it will have to be about as scalable and convenient.
Towing might be ok on paper or in a proof of concept setting. But just imagine somebody telling drivers they need a tower to start the car. The benefits would have to be quite extreme for any driver (or airplane company) to consider it.
I'd point out airplanes already need a tower's permission to start, so requiring normal use of a tow-er might not be much of a change, and it would allow for an excellent gag in a reboot of Airplane!
Off the top of my head, something with enough "oomph" to tow a jet and get it airborne would probably be as heavy on emissions as the jet itself. Gliders are (by comparison) made out of tissue-paper and are very light and thus easy to get off the ground. A jet plane full of passengers, luggage and so forth?
The thought is that it would be electric, and the original energy may come from clean(er) sources, or generated in more remote areas. Thus less pollution and less carbon.
I'm not sold on the idea because it adds a lot of extra complexity. Planes aren't towable from any point of view - structural, aerodynamic, control etc.
I do think electric is the future, because it clearly is. But it will come in time, as battery density and cost improve, and slow, because airplanes are built with very long lifespans in mind. We're seeing now regulations banning short flights due to environmental concerns. Allowing them for electric or even hybrid planes would be a win-win-win situation (third win being positive externalities from improving electric plane tech).
On a sidenote, two-man gliders are really fun to fly. You should totally try it; in my area, a ticket costs about $200 (this pays for a 30-min flight, and an instructor who will teach you how to make the glider go where you want it to go).
In that it if this was successfully implement it would presumably make flying cheaper (it's not till things look like they may reduce cost that industries adopt them), yes.
(a) As a only moderate simplification, jet engines are either on or off. If they're on, they're burning significant quantities of fuel. If they're off, you're not flying. As a consequence, you get relatively few gains from converting some of the energy required to climb from gas to electric because it represents such a small fraction of the fuel burned.
(b) Jet engines mostly make noise because they're moving air, not because of the combustion. So, changing the source of energy that is causing air to move isn't going to save you much (or really anything, although you might get some benefit on the margin from changing the design of the blades). Your standard 4-seater prob plane is much quieter than a jet not because of some magic with the engine, or some magic associated with jets, but because they're moving less air. If you want to get 378 tons to ascent 20,000+ feet, you need to move a lot of air. That means making a lot of noise.
Noise is also a function of how fast you're moving the air; a 707 moving a smaller amount of air very fast (straight jets) is louder than a 747 moving a much larger amount of air only rather fast (high-bypass turbofans).
Indeed, you could make a pretty quiet jet if you built a really huge fan, like 30m across, and had the passenger compartment sit in the middle of this giant hoop, because you wouldn't have to accelerate that enormous mass of air very much to achieve the same change in momentum. Of course, you'd need some extraordinarily light materials to make that big a fan, and it would have some annoying gyroscopic stability issues that would make it a bit tricky to turn. Landing would also be somewhat tricky, but I suppose you could tilt it on enormous hinges and do VTOL.
I live under near University Hospital Galway, which runs the county helicopter ambulance. Jets? I wish. This thing shakes the house on a regular basis, and it's not moving so fast it will be over soon...
[Wow, just out of curiosity I googled University Hospital Galway since I mentioned it, and the Wikipedia is mostly a bunch of axe grinding about certain incidents. The reality is it's a hospital like any other.]
(In Ireland we have a free public health service, it's not that great but it's free. On balance I think that's good, though I haven't ever needed it much anyway. I'm not sure what is impelling me to add this. I suppose the reality is that I understand the staff are doing their best to fix people up with limited resources, but throwing more resources at the problem wouldn't fix it anyway.)
Non CO2 emissions are more damaging at altitude, so the benefits in reducing plane emissions may be skewed toward reducing in flight emissions rather than take off or landing emissions.
(A) A tow plane powerful enough to get an airliner plane off the ground and up to speed is going to be large and expensive.
(B) You almost certainly wouldn't be able to cost effectively retrofit existing planes because none of them are designed to be pulled around by the nose.
(C) Unless you have a carbon free source of electrical power, it's a mug's game anyway, and we don't.
I fly gliders, where towing is common and I have to stress that it's really, really dangerous for the plane being towed and even more dangerous for the one doing the towing. It works for gliders because even if the rope needs to be cut at low altitude, the glider will almost instantly be in stable flight. This wouldn't work for existing airliners, which do not glide well. Even with the ability to cut the rope (and the tow pilot will kick you off without a moment's hesitation if you get too out of line), some of the more dangerous phenomena leading to tug upsets happen in just seconds.
And winch launches are even worse because if the rope breaks you're left not in a stable flying orientation and can easily stall.
There’s no energy savings here. You need the full energy you would have needed before or more. And Jet planes needs Het engines in order to take off. That’s where the major power, and energy is needed. Cruising above the weather is fairly energy efficient.
It's not about saving energy, it's about changing the source of the energy. If your towplane is powered from the electrical grid then you can launch your planes with solar power instead of fossil fuels.
The cost would be more energy as the towing machine has to lift both itself and the plane. Also it would have to be a big robust machine to lift a plane.
if it was possible to use batteries on a plane, it would be in flight not on takeoff where enormous power is needed.
I think a much more realistic (but still probably not feasible right now) idea would be to put electric or steam powered catapults on the runways, like they have on aircraft carriers. Presuming you could power the catapult from a clean energy source then you could reduce emissions slightly this way. Still I'd imagine for safety the plane would still spool up its engines - you'll notice airliners don't come back from full power until they're in a stable climb with the landing gear up.
I think you're only saving a tiny amount of fuel. It's not so much getting up to speed as it is getting up to altitude. An actual airline pilot could correct me, but based on my rough math from playing MS Flight Sim, you'll use between 5-20% of your fuel climbing up to altitude (depending on length of trip), and most of the rest cruising. Now, you make that up somewhat from the savings of flying high. Less drag, less fuel used.
Now if we had a big elevator to take the plane up to 35,000 feet. . . . .
Tethered balloons. When ready you hook your fully-loaded 747 to a truly enormous helium gasbag, which when released floats up to 50,000 feet. At that point you turn on the engines. If all the lights are green, the passengers put on safety belts and assume crash positions, the release mechanism tilts the plane into a 45 degree dive attitude, and the plane is released. The pilots pull out of the resulting steep dive as soon as they can without causing the passenger to black out or the wings to rip off. Assuming they can do it within 10,000 feet they then level out and begin the cruise part of the flight.
Meanwhile, a big electric motor powered by acres of PV panels (and about $1 million Tesla Powerwalls for night operations) winches the balloon back to the ground for another takeoff.
Special bonus disadvantage: the tow plane has to come in and land again once it's done its job, so you've increased the traffic load on your runway by 50%.
Making good progress on my first game. I've finished writing the rough draft for the main dialog, just need to write the rest of it and make more progress in Godot. We're at about where I was when I abandoned the project in 2012 in terms of gameplay currently.
Alpha testing when? It's important to get feedback, and useful to spread motivation to complete across people that aren't just you. Also if you decide to cut it short it's nicer to cap off the project as 1 polished stage rather than N rough ones.
Modeling of each country's Delta waves are all over the place, but after it gets a country to herd immunity, it seems like in-person indoor meetups would be thoroughly appropriate.
That could very well happen first in Europe. The UK wave seems to be cresting (although I've heard a couple competing hypotheses, like a test shortage). They also have very high immunity levels, suggesting that the Delta burn through the remainder of the unvaccinated population would be quick.
The US has a much larger unvaccinated (and uninfected) portion of its population, so the Delta wave will probably be longer and worse. It seems like a good idea to go to (parts of) Europe.
I suggest you not count on herd immunity. Especially since B.1.617.2 seems to be making inroads on both the previously infected and on a greater percentage of the vaccinated than previous variants.
According to this paper, the serum neutralizing antibodies conferred SARS-CoV-2 only have a half-life of only 5 weeks. And CoVs are notorious for reinfecting people.
Are you referring to me or to Yewdell? Either way, if you've got reasoned argument to present with some links to back up your position I'd be willing to listen. But I stopped believing in the Herd Immunity Fairy during the 3rd quarter of 2020 when wimpy little variants from the B lineage with only the B614D mutations created new surges where the models predicted the population should be at or near herd immunity with seropositive rates from previous infections. Remember, back then "experts" like Anders Tegnell were claiming a ~50 percent seropositive rate would create herd immunity (which is what they'd seen with recent flu viruses). Well, Anders was wrong, and Sweden went through a second higher surge.
I don't think your position is supported by evidence. The reinfection rate seems super low. Everything I've read is that antibodies are super long-lasting as well as memory T-cells and so on. I read some things early about antibodies fading but it turned out they were short-term antibodies and the long-term ones last for months and months.
There's some data coming out of Israel that shows the antibody titers from Pfizer drop off quickly after 3 months, and they drop by about 80 percent by 6 months (!). I haven't seen the original study, only a scary summary. And it's significantly contradictory to some of other studies I've read. But I'm not going to discount it until I look at the methodology and the numbers. Also, of course, which sort of antibodies are they talking about?
I've read somewhere that antibody levels normally quickly decrease for a while, and then stabilize, or continue to decrease much more slowly over the years. If this is correct, then a half-life of 5 weeks shouldn't be interpreted such that it then continues to halve every 5 weeks.
You'll probably have a low level of residual antibodies for a year or even two, but the vaccines push those to a much higher level, that will (presumably) stay with you longer — the data is still coming in. Best not to assume being infected with 2019-nCoV, or even B.1.1.7 will offer much protection going forward. And this seems to be the way of CoVs.
That reminds me of a Mulla Nasrudin story. I've heard several versions, but because of its setting it must be of modern instead of medieval vintage. It goes like this...
The management of a factory in Ankara called a mandatory meeting that all the employees were required to attend. This caused much consternation among the workforce, because mandatory meetings were generally a sign that there was bad news coming down the line. With much grumbling and whispering, all the employees gathered. Their union leader, Mulla Nasrudin shushed them all, "Quiet! I need to listen carefully to what management has to say, so I can form our bargaining stance."
When the employees were finally silent, the managing director stepped up to the podium and began to speak. "My friends," he said, "I have a wonderful announcement. From a month hence, the company is going to install robots on the production lines..."
The entire audience gasped...
"...and henceforth, all the labor will be carried out by machines. This will mean that the work we be done perfectly, more efficiently, and it will up our production rate by 200 percent! This will make the entire company more profitable!"
"What about the workers?" shouted Mulla Nasrudin.
"There's no cause for alarm," the general manager assured them. "You will be paid as usual with annual cost of living increases. And your healthcare plans and retirement plans will continue to be funded. All you will have to do is come in every Friday and pick up your pay checks." The general manager was beaming at his astounded audience.
Mulla Nasrudin stood up and addressed the general manager. "This is an outrage! You insist we come in *every* Friday to pick up our checks?!"
Back in the early days, everyone laughed at the concept of herd immunity. And they were right! But more recently it became PC to talk about it.
What's actually happening is that now that vaccines are available for the vulnerable and/or winning, we're going to let it turn into an endemic disease. Hopefully this will work well. But if people are not dying in droves, it won't be because of herd immunity, but because of herd semi-immunity. People, especially and increasingly the young, will have had some contact with the virus, and any new infections they get won't kill them and will leave them more immune than they were before.
I was baffled by 'winning' for a while myself. Am I turning into Trump? Would that be good or bad? But on due consideration, I'm pretty sure I meant 'willing'.
Oh my, oh my, OH MY! I'm shocked at how people are misremebering the history of this pandemic. Anders Tegnell of Sweden latched on to herd immunity as solution for Sweden almost immediately (circa March 2020) — and it didn't work out as well as he claimed it would — but I still haven't heard him admit he was wrong. And around the same time a bunch of right-wing oriented immunologists and MDs issued The Great Barrington Declaration that advocated letting the epidemic take it's course and not to mask or lock down. And right-wing think tanks like the Hoover Institute had various medical shills hit the news talk circuit to lobby against masks and lockdowns, and to advocate for herd immunity.
BTW at that time no one argued that theory of herd immunity was wrong, but a lot of immunologists and epidemiologist pointed it out that it was a stupid idea, because under the best case scenarios, herd immunity wouldn't kick in until 60-70% of any given population was infected — meaning people would continue to die at the high CFRs of the early epidemic (overall, 3 percent of those diagnosed died from COVID-19, until Drs learned how to treat it). By August/September 2020 it was clear to some experts that the pattern of outbreaks weren't reflecting the classic herd immunity scenarios described in the epidemiological literature. Now that vaccination rates are pushing 50 percent in some places, people are starting to talk about herd immunity again, but that seems to be wishful thinking promoted by the gullible MSM or purposeful misinformation from the RWM or by experts who want to offer a light at the end of the tunnel.
Strange. Look at the death rates in the UK. COVID is endemic and everyone will get it (eventually), vaccinated or not, but it will be a mild disease for those with prior exposure or vaccination or youth.
@Deiseach would you be at all interested in having an email conversation with me? I'm a trans woman with I think a rare perspective and I'd like to talk about it. If so, email me at jmb3481@gmail.com
Thank you, but no. I prefer to keep all interactions with other people on social media public. If you wish to discuss anything you feel comfortable sharing in public, it might indeed be a good post to put up here for other people to participate in, if you feel it would illuminate the debate.
Ah, a good while ago I let something that began as "we all met online and had common interests and a great, fun time discussing particular things" turn into an offline friendship via email, except it wasn't really a friendship as it developed, and it petered out badly.
I learned the lesson from that: keep online stuff online, keep public acquaintanceship public. Going "hey, can we take this private?" is not generally something I feel comfortable with, because I feel expectations get set up; on my own behalf, I would certainly feel obligated to respond and interact long past any point where I'd lost interest, because it's not polite to suddenly blank someone.
And to be cynical and CYA about it, because nowadays it's all too easy for "I thought this was a private exchange" to suddenly be made public, with cherry-picked excerpts, by one of the parties and used as evidence that "Look, I told you all PurpleMeanie was wicked! Here be proof that they said one thing in public and another in private!"
I'm not casting any aspersions on Sovereigness and their intentions here, but it's in the self-protective interests of all parties to have any kind of touchy subject in a public forum where there are witnesses to who said what when.
dammit Substack give us a comment editing function!
Consider my recent exchange of views with jstr, who gave me an ultimatum that I couldn't accept because I was offline at the time and didn't see it until the next day, then when I didn't delete the comment that offended him in the thirty-minute window he demanded, he told me he was going to get Scott to ban me.
I ended up eating a minor ban over that. Now imagine we had conducted all that off-line in private emails exchanged. Imagine what he would claim I had or had not said to him.
I agree -- in the modern political climate, private exchanges over controversial topics are marginally more dangerous than public ones; I say "marginally" because I think that public exchanges are already incredibly dangerous.
That said, from a purely selfish point of view, I'd love to read the @Sovereigness vs. @Deiseach debate. So, ladies, feel free to sacrifice your safety for my amusement ! Mwa ha ha !
I do think public is better, for a couple of other reasons:
(1) My opinions aren't very much different, so what I'd say here and what I'd say in private exchange with you wouldn't be too divergent
(2) Where they *would* diverge is that public forces a certain amount of circumspection on me (I know, looking at my ban record you wouldn't think so) but there are 'things what I think' that I would keep private and not say because "SodaDrinker would be very upset by this and I have no particular reason to insult SodaDrinker" (on the other hand, if we were engaging in public gloves-off full and frank exchange, that is a different matter because then I don't care about hurt feelings *IF* I believe what I am saying is true, not just to insult you)
(3) Some things I want to keep in the inside of my head and don't particularly want to share them either public or in private one-to-one
I'm with Deiseach on this one, for the reasons she gave and also because it compromises your public expressions of opinion if you mix them with your private interactions. The former are supposed to be wisdom or as it may be insanity for the ages, the latter are at most about how you learned that wisdom, and may well be more personal.
And a theoretical debate by its nature is a public event.
Also, if a debate started in a public forum, what is the point in taking it private? Is the argument to be made incapable of standing on its own feet? Is it too personal (if so, I think we are all accepting of any necessary anonymisation).
I do not in general accept 'let's take it to email' offers. I interpret them largely as an attempt to silence me. I can accept it may be legitimate on super technical issues where two renowned experts argue on whether a particular stamp cutting machine could have cut a particular stamp - but that is not the usual circumstance.
No thanks. This is the wrong format for a targeted discussion / double crux kinda deal. Id more than happily agree to have the conversation be published/posted publicly afterward, but I don't want to have it through the comment section text processor with interruptions in real-time.
Hell, even I might be amenable to a private discussion on some kinda topic. But on transgender issues, I might not be conservative enough to make it interesting (I'm still conservative by today's standards, mind you). Also, I'm a nobody from nowhere, so discussing anything with me is kind of a waste of time...
Hey, Substack admins, are you watching this ? Your sub-garbage-tier software is literally preventing people from writing free content for you ! Hello ? Anyone home ?
Jack Ma, the Chinese equivalent to Jeff Bezos, disappeared a few months ago. This kicked off a spate of Chinese intervention in their tech market that's gotten really intense in the last few weeks. The Chinese government has seen a sudden push of new regulation, denying permits to operate, and breaking up or even dissolving tech companies. Various tech executives have disappeared and reappeared after having undergone rectification or re-education and there are reports of engineering workforces being forced to undergo ideological training. The Chinese banks/government (same thing) have also announced they're going to radically cut financing for both venture capital and various software companies. Hundreds of billions of dollars of valuation have evaporated in weeks. No one knows where this is going to end up but it looks like the only ones untouched are those directly working for the government like Huawei or some of the surveillance companies.
I hadn't heard about that, and it is worrying. Looking online, he does seem to have reappeared, but it's also very plain that the government cracked down on him *hard*. He thought being rich and entrepreneurial would protect him from the fallout of criticising Chinese government financial policy, and he's learned differently. And so have any other rich Chinese entrepreneurs who might have thought about sticking their heads above the parapet.
The government has been going very hard on the patriotic line in the past couple of months; they've been celebrating the 100th anniversary of the Chinese Communist Party and all kinds of actors, singers, and entertainers in the public eye for their popularity have been having to release patriotic songs, appear in patriotic dramas, appear on celebratory TV shows, etc.
There is only so much fame and fortune you will be allowed to get away with. Any Western pipedreams that capitalism - or the lure of making a lot of money - will convert China into a 'modern secular state' are just that: the government has no objection to making a lot of money, but it can handily do that and remain a tyranny, and the fate of such as Jack Ma is a reminder: we'll let you get rich, but that doesn't mean you can defy us, and we can take it all away as easily as we let you have it in the first place.
Forbes had an article on how dangerous it is to be a Chinese billionaire. They said (half in jest) that on average one Chinese billionaire dies every 40 days. Only 14 of the 72 who've died in the last 8 years were executed by the government, but a substantial number died from foul play and suicide.
Of course, Xi has made it more dangerous for people who have their own financial or political power bases. One analyst suggests that he's trying to avoid the example of Putin, where the Russian billionaire class have enormous say over the Putin's agendas (because he governs mostly with their support). Honestly, though. Xi doesn't seem to kleptocrat, at least not at the scale Putin is. He's supposedly worth about a billion and half dollars from board positions he served on for some Fujian tech companies and from the stock options that went with those board positions. Xi's motivation is more ideological. He wants to be a "good emperor" — good emperors expand Chinese empire and crack down on nobles and warlords (who have a history of breaking up China). In modern China high party officials with independent power bases and wealthy capitalists are the equivalent and nobles and warlords. He regards every leader of China since Mao to be "failed emperors". Xi wants the 21st Century to be China's Century. And he may well be able to pull that off.
Like all authoritarian countries, the government hates & fears power centers in society that are not themselves. This is why every tinpot dictator in Africa does dumb things to harm the local, say, banking sector or telecom industry, or literally any productive or intelligent part of their country. They can't stand these alternate centers of power. A huge huge chunk of the old-school Chinese economy- raw materials manufacturing, chemical companies, all of the upstream manufacturers- are state owned, so having a dynamic part of their economy that's totally private sector must seem very strange to the CCP. I'm sure culturally the tech entrepreneurs don't really fit in well with the typical CCP bureaucrat type- lots of these tech guys lived in the US, went to school here, worked for US tech companies first, etc.
Like every authoritarian country before them, they're going to strangle the smartest most dynamic part of their economy out of fear
The headline reason is control of data. It's not beyond the bounds of possibility this is the case. Wierdly China seems pretty serious about having a gold-standard privacy law in place, although I doubt the CCP believe it applies to the state.
Not particularly an argument I buy, but we can't discount it out if hand just because it's the reason they are giving.
I'm in the UK and would not go to an indoor meetup in September unless cases and hospitalisations are significantly down from the current level (which depends on a whole lot of things about vaccination uptake and effectiveness we don't really know yet).
We’re in the middle of an irresponsible experiment with removing restrictions before vaccine coverage is complete, so I'd say non local indoor meets (ie of people who wouldn't normally mix, especially from multiple localities) are irresponsible to plan at this time.
On the other hand, there are lots of lovely country parks and similar outdoor venues with seating throughout the country and I'd cheerfully attend a meetup in one of those - many have roof but no walls arrangements usually used as smoking areas which are ideal for a weatherproof but relatively covid safe meetup.
To be nice and even-handed, I think both "irresponsible" and "fearmongering" in the above discussion are exaggerations. I'm somewhere between Michelle and Ryan on this point: the recent change in the UK (downgrading lockdown measures from laws to recommendations) is a calculated gamble, trading off the quality of life of the entire population against the health of those people who will get sick or die despite widespread vaccination. On those measures alone, I would lean substantially in favour of the move, but I'm also concerned about the possibility that an outbreak in a vaccinated population, while mostly harmless in itself, might promote the appearance of a vaccine-evading strain. I don't have a good way to quantify this.
Note that a previous gamble taken in the UK - increasing the separation between vaccine doses from 2 weeks to 12 weeks, so as to get more first doses out of a limited supply of vaccine - was irresponsible by conventional medical practice, as this had (at the time) not been tested. But it was (I think) a reasonable choice from an objective standpoint, and seems to have worked out quite well.
I would go to an in-person UK meetup with some concerns about Covid: I would test myself before attending, would wear a mask in public transport on the way there, and would feel slightly more comfortable if it were outside.
Giving this post a one week ban. Normally I would not be anywhere near this harsh, but I asked a question, MT answered it honestly, and I want to make sure people feel comfortable doing this without getting attacked for it so I can keep asking questions and getting honest responses in the future. Realistically this is my fault because I didn't tell people not to start arguments over the responses, but I'll give a short ban just to rub it in.
Already before covid, some meetings in Vienna were outside during summer simply because the air was better outside. And it was nice! But the difference was that we could be flexible: if we knew it was going to rain, we had the meeting indoors instead.
Unfortunately, the weather forecast is not reliable many days in advance. So we need to think about the scenario "we agree to be outdoor, because covid, and then it rains".
That is why I suggested looking for venues with a covered outdoor area - if it gets extremely windy as well as rain it won't be ideal, but it protects your meetup from most summer weather conditions.
I live in Galway Ireland. Rainfall radar where you can see where precipitation has been happening and how it is moving is the only weather forecast I trust. And even it can be at odds with on-the-ground wet reality.
I'd argue that it's irresponsible to *not* have September indoor meetups, at least in places where vaccines are generally available - once vaccination of the willing is complete, the biggest danger from covid is that governments (or culture) go into permanent covid mode, where they keep travel and gathering restrictions or limits forever on increasingly thin pretext. "Universal vaccination" is pretty much the only Schelling point we have on when to come out of lockdown, and if we don't use it we might be stuck in lockdown misery for decades (just like we are with the TSA).
I wouldn't create a group identity for those wanting lockdowns. They've got their varied reasons for their position, and it's going to be easier to argue against them on a group-by-group basis rather than lumping them all together and making the voluntary hermits and the Marxist state maximalists unlikely allies under one banner. Identity creates alliance, so don't give your political opponents a label that unites them.
But some Marxists are concerned about the effect lockdowns have on workers whilst others see this as a way of establishing a norm of state control over the freedom of workers. So not all Marxists agree here, so assuming I am opposed to the continued existence of lockdown laws some Marxists are my allies, some are my opponents.
Um . . . are there actually any maximal pro-lockdown for state control Marxists? Like, I've seen this as a talking point for the last year and a half, that pro-lockdown people are all Marxists and this is how communism comes to America and all, but, only from Maga-types who hated the lockdowns. Are there any public Marxists out there saying that the lockdowns are great because the gov't is finally taking over? Because I think this group is likely imaginary.
I offer Susan Michie, a member of the UK communist party and a proponent of stricter lockdowns as part of the 'Independent Sage' group (self-appointed scientific activists). Also amusingly someone who doesn't like interviewers bringing up her politics... She seems to be a good example here.
Seems to me that another good Schelling point is "universal vaccination *plus* case counts lower than those during any "wave"". This might not be precise enough for a Schelling point, but "universal vaccination" isn't exactly either. But something like >70% of adult population vaccinated and <10 cases per 100,000 people per day is precise.
So I think this is the difference between a Schelling point and a stopping point. What you say would make a good stopping point, but it would have to be declared by a central authority with the competence to decide on it and the credibility to be trusted to be consistent on it, and none of our actual central authorities (at least, in America - somewhere like Singapore might be different - ) have either of those things.
A Schelling point has to ake up for lacking a central authority by being the overwhelmingly obvious point of coordination. Aside from "vaccines are universally available", the only other candidate is true elimination of covid, and it's looking like that's not going to happen for years, if ever.
I don't expect this to be a problem: countries do generally seem to lift restrictions when the case count is very low. (But see my sibling comment to yours.)
The problem is that one of the possible endgames is that between unvaccinated people and breakthrough variants we can't suppress case rates to a very low level—but the rate of fatalities and severe cases becomes very low, especially among the vaccinated. But people look at the case count and get scared: see e.g. how many people criticize the UK government for lifting the restrictions, even though the death rate is an order of magnitude less than at the same stage of the previous wave.
Ok, I've been trying to search and collect evidence and studies that show if antipsychotic do, or not, shrinks the brain in the long term, so does anyone know about more this topic? Any help would be appreciated.
A couple of open threads ago I rambled on about what the US as a multiparty system would look like. I hope it's not gauche for me to continue talking about it, because I've been thinking about this a lot, and also I got some interesting new data. The Republican polling firm Echelon Insights conducted a bunch of research on this exact topic- their Twitter thread about it is here
They theorize 5 political parties for the US- Nationalist (Trumpy), Conservative (Reagan/country club Republican), Acela (Bloomberg/neoliberal), Labor (blue collar economically liberal/socially conservative) and Green (AOC). From their original sample, their respondents broke down at 19/21/12/28/10%, respectively- Labor being the single most popular party. (Interestingly I had a hard time thinking of a US politician to use as an example for that).
As I mentioned, traditional Poli Sci teaches that multiparty presidential systems are pretty dysfunctional, with Latin America being the classic example. The parties squabble, and with a separately elected President with no power to advance legislation on his/her own, not much gets done. I'm trying to imagine how these 5 parties would govern together if they were in Congress now, with Biden as President.
Part of my skepticism is that the present US system incentivizes politicians to act unusually crazily, to bring in campaign donations, and there are no strong party actors to say 'stop being quite so crazy on social media or we'll kick you out'. So the Nationalist and Green parties would be even more obstreperous, because their voters & donors demand it. 'Sure, we'll pass a budget/raise the debt ceiling/fund the military.... once you kick every illegal immigrant out of the country!' says the Marjorie Taylor Green-lead Nationalist party. Or, nationalize every oil company for the AOC-lead Green party, etc.
But- maybe the two more centrist parties would just form a coalition together every single year, and mostly ignore the more extreme parties? This seems to be how, say, Germany runs. Anyways, would be interested in hearing other peoples' points of view. Could these 5 parties pass major legislation on a regular basis? What's political life like in a European country that just gets run by the same two centrist parties every year?
Two other parliamentary countries with proportional representation that I know of are Italy and Israel. The governments of these are much more unstable than Germany's. Parties and coalitions rearrange all the time, and often a coalition member quits and causes the government to fall, leading to either a new election, or at least a new coalition and government in the current parliament. I don't know what factor makes German governments more stable.
The first chancellor, Konrad Adenauer, set many precedents that continue today and established the chancellorship as the clear focus of power in Germany. Under the provisions of the Basic Law giving him the power to set guidelines for all fields of policy, Adenauer arrogated nearly all major decisions to himself. He often treated his ministers as mere extensions of his authority rather than colleagues. While his successors have tended to be less domineering, the chancellor has acquired enough ex officio authority (in addition to his/her constitutional powers) that Germany is often described by constitutional law experts as a "chancellor democracy".
I'm certainly interested in this topic. I assume the other 10% would go to a Ron Paul Libertarianism or a Ted Cruz Christian party. I think how Britain does it is that the leader of the party has a lot of power to crack down on members trying to grab the spotlight- most voters don't even know their own representative, they just vote for the face of the party and the lower politicians are assumed to follow the leaders directions (source:cgp grey). So the leader may make a strong effort to compromise, because if they get a reputation for getting things done that's an incentive for opposition voters to cross party lines to their second choice party.
I view the existence of parties to be prima facie bad; right now the US has a (mostly) de facto party system as a side effect of FPTP. *Why* there would be multiple viable parties makes a huge difference to whether it would be better or worse than current state (e.g., the necessarily de jure party system of proportional representation would be worse; whereas a loose de facto multiparty system arising out of some form of ranked choice or approval voting would probably be better). Also, legislative coalitions need not be consistent from bill to bill under a Presidential executive branch.
I mean, the standard poli sci argument is that Parties Are Good, Actually. And if that isn't true, they seem to be inevitable- is there any country that doesn't have them? As the US already has the weakest parties in the developed world, we've begun to test what it's like to run random celebrities as candidates just based on name recognition- I don't personally think it's a great system....
'Also, legislative coalitions need not be consistent from bill to bill under a Presidential executive branch'- is this true in LatAm? Maybe it is, I'd certainly be interested in learning more. My understanding of coalitions is that they are consistent, and that they break apart if the parties start splitting up bill by bill.
One of my random ideas is that we form strong sub-brands or mini parties inside the current Dem & Republican parties- Justice Dems, Blue Dog Dems, America First Republicans, Country Club Republicans, etc. Then both parties would run their top 2 or 3 candidates via approval voting in the general. So 4-6 candidates, each with their party sub-brand
I'm not familiar with the party systems of LatAm and, given how often I hear Americans describe how something works "in Europe", my immediate reaction is skepticism that the systems are similar enough for a discussion of them as a coherent whole to be meaningful.
I try to avoid harping on my main position too much, but FPTP is so suboptimal and upstream of so many dysfunctions in the US that I view reform proposals that don't address it as either naive or minor. My main concern in this space is that some alternatives to FPTP make party identification a necessary component; if a Condorcet system ends up with parties then so be it, but on the off chance they're not inevitable I'd rather not design them in anyway.
Separately, when I looked for arguments in favor of political parties everything I found was either not unique to parties (i.e., could be replicated through interest groups), presumed a ceteris paribus universe (i.e., nothing else changed except no parties), or were things I oppose (e.g., encourage public participation, make decisions faster).
I feel that political parties cause issues as well, and like the idea of them not existing.
I accept that people will tend have clusters in their preferences, but I really don't like the way parties form block votes, requiring their members to vote the same way.
Having just two parties which might win is the theoretical minimum of a democracy, and can often give effectively no valid choices for strongly held opinions on important topics in practice.
Why not have an election of a fully independent member of congress/representative (US) or member of parliament (UK) in each area. Each candidate could explicitly state what they stood for, their principles and favoured issues. I know they do that anyway, sort of, but effectively most people are primarily voting for the party.
In the UK at least, MPs vote between themselves to elect the prime minister (who then picks a cabinet from the other MPs) - so no further tweaking to choose a head of government is necessary.
However, I imagine that political parties form a kind of end-state regardless of how you start. What change could be made to a current system to make independence more powerful?
The value of parties is that they make for informed voters. If you don't have parties, most voters vote based on feelings they get from personal resonances in TV ads, which are much less informed than just knowing that Democrats are for legal abortion and higher taxes and services while Republicans are for banned abortion and lower taxes and services.
I think you could plausibly put Biden or Manchin under labor, though I'd guess you'd argue that they fit better under Acela and I would grant that you have a case. Going back a bit, Dick Gephardt certainly fit the bill.
Sherrod Brown, the senator from Ohio, comes to mind. There really aren't many old-school labor Democrats left these days, much less labor leaders who are prominent in national politics like John Lewis or Walter Reuther. I follow these things fairly closely and it took me several moments to remember the name of the current leader of the AFL-CIO, Richard Trumka.
This is very interesting, indeed. Given the same data sets, different teams will draw different conclusions based on the decisions they made during the analysis process. And cognitive bias, at least in regards to the prior beliefs and attitudes, had much less effect on the results than expected. I'm still absorbing this, but I thought I'd put it out there for the rationalist community to consider...
"Abstract:
How does noise generated by researcher decisions undermine the credibility of science? We test this by observing all decisions made among 73 research teams as they independently conduct studies on the same hypothesis with identical starting data. We find excessive variation of outcomes. When combined, the 107 observed research decisions taken across teams explained at most 2.6% of the total variance in effect sizes and 10% of the deviance in subjective conclusions. Expertise, prior beliefs and attitudes of the researchers explain even less. Each model deployed to test the hypothesis was unique, which highlights a vast universe of research design variability that is normally hidden from view and suggests humility when presenting and interpreting scientific findings."
The biases we're referring to tend to be "small": your first idea that seems to work is hard to let go, regardless of its source. I'd _totally_ expect that to manifest as "a vast universe of research design variability that is normally hidden from view". "Humility when presenting and interpreting scientific findings" feels like a core principle of the rationality crowd.
Guessing there's a vocabulary drift, such that most people think of Big Culture™ problems when they see the words "cognitive bias"? The way you say "prior beliefs and attitudes" makes me think that's closer to what you meant, vs the (for example) "I got a headache when I changed the lightbulb, and it went away when I changed back, so it was obviously the lightbulb!" level of confirmation bias that we (or at least, I) try to focus on.
That's definitely an interesting result, but I feel it leaves too many questions unanswered. They have a large unexplained variance and attribute it "idiosyncratic researcher variability", but that seems very vague to me. I think it'd be enlightening to do a detailed breakdown of some models that gave opposite conclusions, and try to figure out what the driving factors were. Is it the interpretation of the thesis into a statistical question? Is it methods to clean data? Adjusting for confounders? It wouldn't be surprising to me if interpretation or confounders reversed results, but it would be surprising to me if cleaning data did.
To their credit, they have a ton of supplementary materials available, so I might be able to find out myself--if I had the will and the time.
I got confused with their multiverse analysis. My reading is that they ran a whole class of models with varying modeling decisions. Then they explain 16% of the variance of the outcome. I don't understand why it's not 100%--if you're accounting for every parameter that went in, then you can explain 100% of the variation of the outcome, right? So I must be misunderstanding something. I feel this is important because it could suggest much of the unexplained variance should really be research design variance. (Again, although there's enough supplementary material that I could probably figure this out myself, it's not something I have the will and time for.)
Agree. I think this would be study that would be difficult to reproduce — at least in the way they ran it. But it does suggest some interesting avenues for further investigation.
Paul Graham asked recently, "What's the oldest man-made object that you can hold in your hands that has never been lost and later found by someone else?" I found it to be a fun rabbit hole and posted my answers here: http://llamasandmystegosaurus.blogspot.com/2021/06/the-oldest-thing-that-has-never-been.html but I'd like to get help from some of the knowledgeable crowd here.
(I tried to post this on the subreddit, but it was removed and they said to post it here.)
I'd go with a church treasure or document. The oldest I can say I've not held but certainly looked at and registered it could be picked up in my hand is a charter in Worcester cathedral from the 730s. I think that's as old as you'll get in Britain and northern Europe, but I suspect the Papacy at least have older objects they've had since creation/gifting, as may some of the other western Mediterranean churches and probably several of the eastern churches. Buddhist temples and maybe some Hindu ones could also have continuity of ownership although the British Empire and the Chinese government may have disrupted things a bit.
But people are much more motivated to 'borrow' them. I considered treasures alongside documents, but I think the oldest non-documentary never-lost item in Britain is a knife in Durham Cathedral's treasury. Nothing special (it was a symbolic gift representing the transfer of land I believe) so not worth stealing/trading. I suspect there's older examples around but I doubt they will approach documents in this category.
Incidentally, papyrus lasts a long time in the right conditions, so has a very long shelf life on a dry, qute warm shelf. As does paper (parchment's exact shelf life is less established I think due to being used in more marginal environments and generally later).
From some googling it looks like the oldest document in the Vatican is the Vergilus Vaticanus https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vergilius_Vaticanus, from around 400 AD. The exact chain of ownership from 400 to 900 AD isn't known, but that doesn't mean it necessarily got "lost" during this period.
I'd apply a historian's definition of lost here, so ownership unknown. Otherwise we have to allow some slightly crackpot claims in implying continuity with the apostles or the pharoahs... Also, a lot of manuscripts were rediscovered (admittedly probably sitting an the bottom of a bookchest) in the eighth and ninth century when the Carolingian renaissance (sic) causes a renewed interest in old works, so I would be happy arguing the Virgil Vaticanus was likely lost for a while.
That said, it would be great if the oldest continuously-owned item in church possession was the work of a secular, pre-Christian poet...
This is a tricky question with lots of weird edge cases – for example, many of the Willendorf-style "Venus" statues were never lost, they were *deliberately buried* and later found. I presume you'd count that as lost, but then how about a book that's been in the same library for hundreds of years without anybody actually caring about it, despite the catalogue indicating its exact shelf location the whole time, until someone did care and "rediscovered" it, highlighting its importance? Or grave goods located in a Christian church but undisturbed and unseen for centuries, such as certain relics? Or how about the Mona Lisa, which was stolen, and shortly thereafter returned? It went missing from its "proper" place, but there was continuity of possession – at least one person knew where it was at any given moment.
Those preliminaries aside, I would have to guess that the Codex Sinaiticus, the oldest Bible in the world, currently housed in the British Library (if you want to find it, it's next to the case containing the second-oldest Bible in the world), is a strong candidate; it's older than the Vatican Virgil and, although the provenance isn't fully charted, is unlikely to have ever been lost and then refound. At one point a guy who stole it claimed to have found it in a wastepaper basket (thrown out by monks, no less!), but I think we can disregard that as an obvious fabrication by a thief.
I'm not sure we can say the Codex Sinaiticus has not been lost, since it is only recorded from 1761 at the earliest. We can say it wasn't written at the monastery of St Catherine's though since it predates that (or any other Christian) monastery, so there clearly has been at least one change of ownership. I guess the question is whether we have to know loss happened or whether we want clear evidence loss did not happen.
I'm going "balance of probabilities" here. I agree that it clearly can't have originated in the monastery where it was first recorded in modern times, but on balance it seems to me to be much more likely that it was carried from one monastery or shrine to another in unbroken tradition, first as "a Bible, we need those for obvious reasons" and later as an increasingly precious relic. I have a few arguments in defense of this besides mere intuition about how these things go: few Bibles seem to have been lost at all except to pillaging and other pagan destruction, since they were in the possession of religious institutions whose whole purpose was to pass on these exact scriptures; most Bibles lost in the monastic system were either scraped as palimpsests to rewrite a better copy clean on the same parchment, or if they were in really bad shape, cut up for use as bookbinding materials in new Bibles (one often finds parchment strips with writing in the spines in particular); those Bibles that *were* lost don't seem to have been often recovered – I can't off the top of my head think of a single such case although of course that in itself proves nothing; increasingly as the codex became more valued by the monks, they would have taken care to prevent it from going astray, even above what they would normally apply to keep their books safe which, again, is a great deal.
Anyhow, if you wanted an *absolutely* ironclad moment-to-moment provenance I don't think you can possibly get back further than items made in the late 16th century, as the very idea of written provenances, collection catalogues etc. is not terribly old.
I love all the answers people have posted. Personally, I think a written provenance criterion is too strict. If it's in a warehouse somewhere or a bank or palace or museum basement or forgotten in a library, fine with me-- someone still is keeping it. The thing being ruled out here is the object being rediscovered by an archaeologist.
So, im gonna take this a different direction. Assuming we have some sort of metaphysical arbiter that knows wether an item has been held before by a human i would just start picking up rocks that wash up on the beach. One of them must have started as something that you could consider the same rock over 2k years ago and now its palm sized.
The recent wave of COVID infections is almost exclusively among unvaccinated people. I assume the vast majority of ACX readers who have access to a vaccine has gotten one, so I don't see much risk for a gathering in areas where it is widely available. I would go to a meetup, but there isn't one anywhere near me.
Two factors affect how many infections in unvaccinated vs vaccinated: the protection afforded by the vaccine, and the respective sizes of the two populations. As you note, it is harder to work out if you are only looking hospitalisation, and there is also the complication of asymptotic infection.
Best data I can find is from the UK REACT study, which works by randomly sampling total UK population every two weeks. In the last round but one (8th July) they reported infection rates were 3x lower for fully vaccinated people.
So if your vaccinated population is 3x the unvaccinated, which is roughly where we are in the UK, you would see the same absolute numbers of infections in vac and unvac - which is roughly what we are getting right now. Many few vac end up in hospital, though.
compare that data above with this https://covid.cdc.gov/covid-data-tracker/#cases_casesper100klast7days and it's not difficult to draw conclusions. Why the CDC doesn't just post the numbers on hospitalized unvaccinated is beyond me but apparently has something to do with the lack of consistent reporting from a certain state - no need to guess which one - it's that big thing on the southern border showing no data available.
Welllllll, with some caveats. LA is seeing that 20 percent of the new Delta infections are among fully vaccinated people. But as of last week ZERO of those infections resulted in hospitalization. It's the unvaxxed that heading for the ICU — and possibly the morgue.
If only we could upload our consciousness into a computer simulation we wouldn't have to worry about our bodies. Of course, it would be inevitable that there would be pathogenic programs in such a system...
In the Crazy Like Us Review, Scott wondered what a society with Mental Health Unawareness Campaigns would be like. It was presented as fanciful, but his description actually reminded me of one real society---Nazi Germany in the Second World War. At least according to the Israeli military historian Martin van Creveld in his book Fighting Power, the Nazis disdained psychiatry as a Jewish science and had very little willingness, compared to the Anglo-Saxon countries, to accommodate soldiers with what we would now call PTSD.
And, at least according to van Creveld, it worked---the German armed forces had considerably lower rates of mental health casualties than Anglo-American ones. He further argues, in an anti-mental health/psychiatry vein, that this was a difference in the actual incidence of the problem, not merely in reporting/diagnosis. I don't know anywhere near enough to say if this is an accurate judgement, but perhaps people more knowledgeable about these issues would find the chapter discussing this interesting.
Also, maybe someone brought this up already, but I feel obligated to mention Sebastian Junger's book Tribe, which argues that warfare (e.g. London during the Blitz) can often *decrease* the prevalence of mental health issues.
As I understand it the German army, for reasons unrelated to their politically-motivated psychiatric beliefs, had a troop rotation policy that was much more aligned with what the enlightened western allies would later determine to be the best way to treat PTSD.
To be specific, the Germans kept units at the front until the unit as a whole was combat-ineffective (i.e roughly 10-20% casualties from all causes), then rotated the entire unit to the near-rear for R&R and integrating replacements, then rotated it back to the front. The US & company kept units at the front almost continuously, removing individual soldiers as they became casualties, and backfilling at the front with replacements. The casualties, insofar as their physical or psychological injuries had rendered them combat-ineffective, were sent home - or if they did manage to recover, were sent to whichever unit needed an immediate replacement. This had nothing to do with anyone's PTSD policy, because nobody understood PTSD well enough to create a decent PTSD-specific policy, they just treated individual victims as another sort of casualty when the symptoms were too severe to ignore.
The best way to treat combat-related PTSD appears to be to catch it as early as possible, before the particular victim's symptoms have become severe enough to render them wholly combat-ineffective. To give them someone to talk to in a safe environment, ideally a psychiatrist who understands PTSD but a chaplain or a sympathetic buddy in a pinch. And then if they are up for it, send them back to the front with the same people they are starting to feel that they have abandoned and betrayed in their "weakness".
For all but the worst cases (the ones in the 10-20% all-casualties total that resulted in the unit being pulled back), the German rotation doctrine accomplished this better than the Allied. By accident rather than design, but it worked.
My understanding is that their thinking was heavily influenced by WW1. The French army actually mutinied and started refusing orders. The German army hadn't, but German commanders were quite spooked about the possibility. The British blockade eventually resulted in the Germans succumbing, and there was a mutiny in the German navy, so the Germans regarded it as imperative to avoid that and keep the population well-fed. But their thinking was less about individual soldiers being ineffective and more about whether their units would still be reliable.
People always talk about how Thomas Hobbes' Leviathan was Deeply Influenced by his observation of the English Civil War. But wasn't the English Civil War sort of, if anything, the exact *opposite* of a Hobbesian conflict? Two organized factions fought for control of a powerful, centralized state, driven by high-minded religious/ideological beliefs. In doing so, they, at least by the standards of most civil wars, generally respected civilians and private property. Whereas the brutal, self-interested, disorganized, etc. dynamics of conflict that Hobbes so insightfully described would seem more evident in e.g. the Scottish Highlands or rural Ireland, or in England during the Dark Ages.
If you were bullied physically (that is, people consistently and without provocation went past threating and actually hit you/physically prevented you from moving),
did this increase or decrease your fear of violence vs:
People that never got past the threatening phase, ie, you are surrounded and can't leave, but nobody is hitting you/holding you down?
I routinely got into fights and occasionally got lightly beaten by a group, and after getting out of the system, I notice that I am not afraid of physical violence/confrontation at all, but I get very quickly keyed up when someone is confrontational (I.e, if I am in a situation where another man whom I am having a negative interaction with approaches closer that 2 feet, my heart rate picks up and I feel myself entering fight mode, like I am 2 rounds deep into a sport fighting match.)
This means I do well in arguments/ aggressive negotiation at work and out, but that I need to be very aware of what is actually a threat, and what is behavior from someone who's never been struck with murder aforethought.
I wonder if having the threatening behavior without the actual physical component would have been even worse.
It didn't work that way for me. I started off with an strong aversion for violence, where I would only fight back after an immense amount of bullying, but this never changed along the way.
It wasn't that choosing to fight would lower the barrier and would make it easier to do so the next time. It was more that the frustration would be lifted a bit and then it took a very long time for the bucket to overflow again.
I think I have a similar reaction. I was much smaller than other kids at school for a long time, and I also had a smart mouth. (Maybe I still do?) I got smacked around a little bit at school, but never seriously hurt. But I was afraid at school a lot when I was 7-9th grades.
When there's a threat of a fight, I get a high heart rate and sometimes even the shakes, even when I'm not afraid, which is really annoying. I'm not sure if that's a result of the bullying or just how I am, though.
I don't think I'm an aggressive negotiator. I won't haggle on a car or at a yard sale, for instance. Not sure if that's just avoiding a fight or just not caring enough, though.
I almost wish I could have gone to Vietnam to see how I'd have held up in real danger.
I was frequently verbally bullied when I was in middle school, but very rarely physically bullied. And that was just being pushed around; I've never been punched or beaten up, I don't think I've even been in any kind of real fight (wrestling with neighborhood kids or cousins doesn't count) since I was six years old.
But my adult mental state is almost exactly the same as yours. I'm mostly easygoing, but I can really get mean with administrators (it's always administrators) who are pushing around me or my family. (I blew a fuse at the hospital a week ago.)
I think my main difference from other people due to bullying is that I'm very PTSD-prone. The first few girls I talked with rejected me, so I have extreme anxiety at the thought of talking socially to attractive women, and have had that all my life, and probably will have it forever.
I did a 180 on a snowy highway five years ago, and while it didn't terrify me, it made me terrified of driving. I'm coming back from that and can drive alone almost anywhere in my city now, but not on interstates or over certain bridges.
I had some mental problems when I was socially isolated when I was young, and I've been very scared of being isolated since then.
These responses are making me think that the whole conflict averse/tolerant and violence averse/seeking are on separate axis, and are at least a bit inborne.
So long as the meetups are outside in the open air, I don't consider them irresponsible. If one were to happen in Amsterdam or anywhere else in the Netherlands I would definitely go.
Serbia is opening up, and while in September more soft measures might be in place, a meeting in the open air should not be a problem. I don't think there's any, but I'd be willing to organize some! Perhaps monthly or bi-weekly, don't know how I can find out if there's interest (except through this comment I suppose)
You may have seen this paper, covered recently in media e.g. Vice and the Guardian (UK), which plugs recent data into some 20th century modelling of the risk of catastrophic societal collapse in the mid-21st. It concludes that we're in a critical 10-20 year period in which 'business as usual' is likely to be disastrous. I don't know enough to appraise it though and would appreciate insights from anyone who does.
The original book apparently discussed four scenarios: BAU (strong growth until ~2015, sharp collapse from then), BAU2 (more resources discovered, collapse starts later), CT (decline at some later point but no collapse due to high technological development) and SW (voluntarily limiting/stopping growth, resulting in stabilization).
What this paper seems to do is look at which of the four models matches the real-world trajectory the best. What it doesn't to is prove that the book's model is correct, and the future will be anything like one of its scenarios.
In previous updates, the BAU scenario matched the actual figures the best. Since the world economy didn't start to collapse around 2015, the BAU2 and CT scenarios are now the best match; since we didn't start to significantly limit growth, SW is the worst match.
In other words, as far as I can tell, what this paper shows is that we are still growing fast. What it doesn't show is that we're going to collapse.
While I can certainly appreciate the petulant implication here--someone, somewhere simply *must* discover some thing that will enable business as usual--the universe is rarely that accommodating to human desires or notions of fairness.
But we have discovered something that will totally or mostly replace oil - nuclear and renewables. In any case there’s more oil out there than people realise, the 30 years of reserves left we always hear about is of “proved” production. That is proven oil fields where the oil is flowing, not known oil fields not yet tapped. Include the latter and you get about 100 years in reserve. Include all known reserves not tapped because they are technically or economically yet unviable and it’s a few hundred years. Not all of these will become viable but enough will. Shale fields were unviable once. Venezuelan oil was too heavy. Technology changed.
A few years ago a search for peak oil would get you results about peak supply. Now it’s peak demand. As oil gets swapped out demand is expected to fall even as the global economy grows.
I have to agree with Doc. And I always feel it necessary to do a reality check on statements like this.
Our civilization currently consumes 21 TWY (TeraWatt Years) of energy yearly. Say an averaged size nuke puts out 1 GWh or 1,000 MegaWatts hours of energy — said nuke will (with no down time) put out 8,760,000 MWh in the course of a year -- or 8.76 TWh. Divide by the 8760 hours in a year, and you get 0.001 TWY. So it would take 21,000 1-GigaWatt nukes to equal our global energy expenditure. Each of those 1-GigaWatt plants would consume 27.6 metric tonnes of reactor grade Uranium each year. 54,000 mts of U are produced each year. We'd reach peak Uranium after feeding 1,900 1-Gigawatt nukes. And alternative reactor technologies are not ready for prime time. These include breeder reactors, Thorium reactors, and "mining" Uranium from sea water.
So nukes are out. Fusion? Well, Fusion seems always to be 20 or 30 years in the future.
Plus oil is mostly used in transportation. Ships and planes won't run far on battery power. So even though renewables are supposed to meet 45 percent of our energy needs by 2040, we'll still need oil for transportation.
It's pleasant to think that technology will bail us out, but energy is the key dependency of our current civilization. I think we're more likely to see catastrophic economic disruption in the next 30-50 years that could end our comfortable techno civilization. And I think that will get us before AGW gets us 50-80 years out. I feel lucky that I'm living in a golden age, and that I'll probably be dead before I see its end.
What I expect is that as oil (or other finite natural resources) become scarcer, the remaining resources will gradually become more and more expensive (as the only remaining sources are more costly to extract), and that will make the economy adapt to using less of them. We won't suddenly hit a wall. (Though with oil, we'll probably gradually stop using it in favor of renewable energy out of concerns about global warming before we would run out of it.)
As the new study admits in Section 1.4, the book didn't consider this corrective price mechanism. It's far from obvious that it's preferable, let alone necessary to avoid collapse, to purposely restrict our resource consumption (presumably through government force) rather than let the above market mechanism run its course. Perhaps we do, but this study doesn't tell us that. It only considers four specific scenarios from a 1972 book, which didn't consider a realistic price mechanism.
Doesn't seem any more likely than that it will run out of iron, or water, or lithium. When the price for pulling it out of the ground increases enough, it will be cost-effective at the margin to recycle it, and that's what will happen. By "recycling" I mean pull the CO2 and H2O out of the atmosphere and reconstitute the hydrocarbon.
How that will be done is an interesting question, but given the fact that this is exactly what green plants do, and where the oil came from in the first place, it seems rather likely it will go through some kind of engineered photosynthetic organism.
It’s just throwing numbers at each other. The model has a lot of specific details in resources and population and whatever that are empirically false (oil and resource usage isn’t running out as we transition out) and demographic factors appear to be currently smoothed out by the demographic transition.
Seeking advice: should I pressure my aunt into getting the COVID vaccine?
Context: My aunt is 78 years old, and I'm the only remaining family member that she's close to. I'm about to have a baby, and she is very excited for me and is eager to meet the baby. This would involve airplane travel. She has not gotten the COVID vaccine (or any vaccine for many years, even the flu shot). She's not ferociously anti-vax, but believes very strongly in "natural medicine" and thinks that "putting artificial things" in her body is a bad idea.
I am tempted to tell her she can't meet the baby unless she gets vaccinated. Partly out of potential risk to the baby, but mostly because I'm extremely worried she's going to get COVID and I haven't been able to make any progress with gentle persuasion. The pressure might work, but it would feel cruel, like I'm emotionally blackmailing her. I'm also concerned she might A) refuse or B) lie to me that she's gotten it.
How do you think she would react if you asked for vaccination "as a favour", something which would make you feel safer, taking away one of the things you need to worry about in this stressful new situation?
Thank you for the response, I appreciate hearing all perspectives. (Just to clarify: my primary concern in this matter is my aunt's health. I'm only very slightly concerned about any risk to the baby from COVID.)
I don't see how it is reasonable to try to blackmail her to get vaccinated for her own health. Threat her like an adult. Try to convince her with arguments and if she refuses, merely act on your own health concerns (which includes your baby).
Note that the vaccinated can also get ill and pass on the virus, so acting differently for the sake of your baby depending on whether she gets vaccinated may not make much sense.
Thank you for the advice; you've put your finger on the exact reason why I'm hesitating. The majority of my friends and family have been completely in favor of the idea of issuing an ultimatum to my aunt in order to try and force her to get vaccinated for her own good. I understand the reasoning--which is why I'm still considering it--but it feels condescending and manipulative.
I don't follow her health advice (e.g. to use essential oils instead of getting the flu shot each year) because I think it's incorrect and I'm an adult who can make my own decisions. She respects that choice, although she disagrees. So far, I've always extended the same respect to her.
You might want to consider a more effective communication strategy, like going to a COVID survivor forum and finding someone who also trusted in healthy living and the like, but still got seriously ill, much more so than for the regular flu. Then put them in touch with your aunt and see if that works better.
In general, the message that this is much worse than the flu and that her normal strategy is merely not enough for COVID, even though it is for the flu, is probably much more persuasive than trying to convert her to a general pro-vaccine position. Primarily because this doesn't require her to completely change her position, but just add a partial exception, where COVID is best combated with essential oils plus a vaccine.
Another option is to explain something similar to the above yourself, but then without compromising your own beliefs. Explain to her that being healthy does reduce the risks (which it actually does, although not as much as she thinks), but this virus is so dangerous that it isn't enough just to be healthy. To illustrate this, you might show some testimony by a very athletic youth that got a nasty case of the COVIDs.
And you may also want to address your own beliefs. The fatality rate of her age group is probably between 4% and 13%, so it's far from a death sentence. And the chance that she gets it through travel is considerably below 100%. So realistically, the actual chance is considerably lower than 13%. So the chance is pretty good that she'll be all right. You could choose to accept that she is probably taking a similar risk to someone climbing Mount Everest.
Or, you could sidestep the issue by finding someone dependable and safe to drive across the country to pick up your aunt and drive her over (depending on how far away she is).
I think this would be manipulative and unethical, unless you can honestly say the risk to your baby alone would be enough to make you do this. Your aunt's choice is unwise, but it's hers to make. Withholding affection (access to your baby is a form of affection) from someone to make them do what you want is a terrible way to interact with people, and I suspect it will quickly erode your sense of respect and empathy if you start down that path.
IMO it’s fine to restrict aunt from traveling to you if you think there’s a significant risk of harm to them. It isn’t “her choice to make” in a freedom sense if it’s traveling to you. Withholding affection is fine if the affection has a mild side effect of death.
They can’t receive affection if they’re dead! And in general, and especially with old people who are often quite stubborn, some amount of antagonism and coercion can be necessary. In this case it isn’t even coercion though, just a plain “you can’t visit because I don’t want you to die”. My grandpa wasn’t allowed to drive a car anymore by his family even though he had a license - for his safety - is that coercion? It significantly restricts his freedom.
And there’s also phones you can call them and talk!
The typical reason to disallow the elderly to drive is not their safety, but the safety of others. If it's just their safety, it's their call, IMO, just like if they prefer to risk death due to COVID while meeting family, over meeting family with a vaccine or staying at home.
> In this case it isn’t even coercion though, just a plain “you can’t visit because I don’t want you to die”.
That is coercion. If they want to do something that has certain consequences to them and you try to force them to do something different because of your belief of what it good for them, you are coercing.
But based on your statements, I think that you consider a high level of authoritarianism to be normal.
Exactly. I was terrified my elderly mum would hurt someone with her car. Fortunately you can ask the State DMV to have someone take a road test. Which she failed. TG. It cost more to arrange for transportation (she lived in the suburbs) but totally worth the peace of mind. I do want to say, that was one piece of bureaucracy that I appreciated. She was a strong willed woman, so my telling here she couldn't drive was just a battle, but "Mom, you failed your road test, it's illegal for you to drive" worked. Hmm there is something a little coercive and underhanded in my behavior...
You should read up on how life is in small villages or prehistoric societies or tribes. Their day to day interpersonal interactions necessary for survival and hunter gathering would be naziism by that authoritarian standard. What my great grandparents did to each other on their farms would be tantamount to Soviet purges lol.
Significant levels of “coercion” are good between family and community members. If your husband is going to kill him self by drinking, you should not restrict yourself to being a wholesome non coercive person, you should try to stop it. It seems very cold to not try to stop people you are close to from seriously harming themselves just because that’s coercion. You shouldn’t let someone die just because they’re dumb! And if you want to use the “well cars kill other people” line, so does Covid! If your unvaccinated grandpa gets Covid from you and your kid, they’ll spread it to their bridge friends and kill them too! Wouldn’t you try a bit of coercion if your grandpa was getting scammed or something like that? We actually have the legal process of power of attorney if, for instance, a young woman is trying to seduce and marry an old, senile person to take their money. That’s not as severe as deaths!
Softer forms of "pressure" may be effective and appropriate, but hard ultimatums are almost certainly neither. When your unvaccinated aunt dies of COVID later this year, are you going to feel better about having never let her meet her grand-niece? Or, if she lives a long healthy but estranged life, vaccinated or otherwise, are you going to feel better for you and your daughter having absented yourselves from it?
Don't count on the fantasy scenario where she gets vaccinated and thanks you for the push and you all live happily ever after.
It's very odd to see an argument from feelings here. Especially missing the crucial difference in chance of the aunt dying from COVID with and without vaccination.
The chance of the aunt dying if she gets COVID while unvaccinated is maybe 10%. The odds of her getting COVID in the first place, are probably no better than 50%. And the odds of her getting vaccinated because of this sort of "pressure", are probably also no better than 50%. So with 95% confidence, the only question is what is the OP's relationship with their aunt in the interval between now and her previously-scheduled death from not-COVID. And a big chunk of the remaining 5% is, yes, the grief of knowing that the aunt died in spite of what the OP tried to do and died alone because of what the OP tried to do.
Some quick Googling says 2.2% of all deaths are traffic fatalities. Is that a high enough number of deaths to coerce relatives into never driving again? What would be a high enough percentage, in your view, to refrain from living the life you would otherwise want to live?
A 2.2% chance of dying over your lifetime for a critical activity is quite different from a 5% chance of dying in a six month period. And yes, if the risk of death from driving is much higher in less time, it is ethical - taking grandpas car away is sometimes justified, and there’s even a legal mechanism to make their drivers license get taking away if they fail a test.
It's not necessarily a "fantasy" to insist on vaccination as a condition of socializing!
I told my high-risk parents that I would cancel my trip to see them in two weeks if they didn't get their second dose of COVID by the end of last week (they'd delayed it first by circumstances outside of their control, then laziness/red tribe contrariness set in).
I was firm but kind about my personal risk tolerance for infecting them now that Delta variant is surging. They decided they'd rather be inconvenienced by getting the second dose than miss out on a trip from me.
We're all good now, and my mom LITERALLY said, "Thanks for forcing the issue."
Thank you for sharing your perspective, I appreciate it. I haven't decided what to do yet, but your comment helped me realize part of why I'm stuck on this dilemma: I'm not sure I would be willing to enforce an ultimatum if I made one. If I were to go down that path, I'd have to be prepared to accept the outcome of not seeing my aunt in person for years, or possibly ever again.
Hm. You said you're the only remaining family member she's close to - is she actively estranged from everyone else? If so, were the estrangements her fault?
If yes, then she might indeed be the type to take such great offense for so long that you wouldn't see her again. You do have the option of walking back the ultimatum at any time, but if she's a difficult personality, she might indeed prefer to hold a grudge to the bitter end, even if you tell her you've changed your mind.
If yes, I'd like to point you at CaptainAwkward, a marvelous advice blogger. One of her dominant themes is to not surrender to the "But faaaaaaaamily!" argument, wherein blood relationships are to be preserved at *any* cost, no matter how unreasonable / disrespectful/ abusive / dangerous / cruel / etc the aggressor might be. C.A.'s argument is that boundaries are more important than blood; and those who don't respect reasonable boundaries are not and should not be entitled to close, loving relationships (unless they change and behave better). She has a lot of letters that cover negotiating "but faaaaaaamily!" situations and maybe even one about covid vaccine persuasion, although I can't find it right now and might have made it up.
But one of the biggest takeaways is that you don't have to tolerate the bad behavior of anyone because they're "faaaaaamily!" or lonely, or old. You wouldn't be at "fault" if your aunt took offense to your boundaries around baby handling and estranged herself from you.
But if none of that sounds familiar or would apply, and if you think your aunt would be mad but eventually "forgive" you - a new, 'nervous' parent, no less! - should you walk back the ultimatum, then it would seem to be worth the risk, at least from what little you've said.
It just depends on the kind of person your aunt is.
>is she actively estranged from everyone else? If so, were the estrangements her fault?
Ah, well, settling the question of who's at fault for what in my family would take somewhere between the length of a Captain Awkward column (I'm a big fan of hers btw!) and a decade of therapy. However, you've correctly spotted that one of the underlying issues here is that my aunt can be stubborn and unpleasant at times.
However, I do love her and appreciate many things about her. My objectives are to maintain the relationship between us--within appropriate boundaries--and to take whatever steps I reasonably can to get her to protect her own health.
Between your input and some other folks, I've been contemplating alternatives beyond what I had been thinking of as my two options: let her do whatever she wants vs. issue an ultimatum. Instead, I may wind up asking her not to visit this fall unless she's willing to get vaccinated, but offer as an alternative that the baby and I will travel to visit her in the spring. I had been thinking of doing this anyway, and at that point the baby will have been able to get many of their own important vaccinations, flu season will be past, and at the very least my aunt won't be taking on so much additional risk because she won't be the one traveling.
I really appreciate the time you've taken to explain your views and offer advice! This discussion has been very helpful in clarifying the issue for me.
In addition to the advantages you listed of taking the baby to her, you'd also be going in (presumably) warmer weather, when COVID infections appear to naturally drop off, anyway.
Plus, newer babies aren't as cute and fun as older babies, who are more aware and interactive!
I think offering the choice between "see baby soon" (but vaccinate) or "see baby later" (don't have to vaccinate) is so fair that only a very grumpy, entitled sort of person would bristle at those options. I think even my opponents here would agree that if she gets offended by the boundaries of you offering two sensible choices in how to see the baby, she's the one who's out of line, not you.
I'd be interested to hear how it turns out! In the meantime, congrats on your upcoming baby!
Consider the precedent you're setting, if you even hint that access to her nephew/niece can be used as leverage for you to get her to do something you want. *This* time it's something to do with your aunt's own health. Will it be next time, or the time after that? When she thinks that through -- and she will, she can't reach age 78 without having a lot of basic insight into the nature of human relationships -- will *she* conclude this is just a one-off, or the start of a discouraging and degrading trend?
There's a good reason we often put certain methods of leverage permanently off the table, with certain people, even if there's a very worthwhile immediate end that appears to justify this particular means, this time. We're saying "with you, I forswear certain means, no matter how important my immediate ends, because that preserves some important long-term trust between us."
Baby-handling practices before COVID *often* included wearing masks, being vaccinated, and washing hands before holding a very new baby.
Those were all reasonable practices then, and they're reasonable practices with COVID.
@edashwood is entitled to place whatever terms they feel necessary on when and how people visit with their new baby. If would-be visitors don't want to comply with mask wearing, hand washing, or vaccination, that's their choice.
She certainly is, but I am inviting her to think through the consequences first. Few people want to permanently alienate family members to whom they are close, and I think there is some slight chance of that -- people can feel very strongly about things like this (as perhaps the number and heat of the comments here rather demonstrates, and it's not like the baby is even related to any of us).
For that matter, the baby will grow up, and few parents want to disadvantage a child by alienating family on his or her behalf long before the child can have a say.
It might be different if the *baby's* health were at risk, but I am taking the OP at her word that her concern is the *aunt's* health.
I don't know if the baby will be very new, I am assuming not, since I thought the conventional wisdom was that a newborn should have no contact with anyone not in his immediate household for at least several weeks. That was certainly my practice, but then all my children were born in the last century so perhaps people are less worried now.
Thank you for the advice; I appreciate you sharing your perspective. I agree that the key difference here is whether I'm setting a condition for the baby's sake, or for my aunt's sake.
I do feel that I have the right--and truly the responsibility--to enforce whatever boundaries I decide are best for the health of my child. But in this case, that would only be the pretext. It would really be about enforcing a choice on my aunt over her natural inclinations. I would be doing it "for her own good", which feels quite different to me.
Well, good luck with the decision, and congratulations on the baby.
For what it's worth, if my adult daughter (she's about 32) were to attempt to pressure me on a subject which is this personal (my own health decisions) using access to my grandson as a lever, I would be really, really upset. It would be fine if she remonstrated with me, yelled at me, showered me with links to articles explaining what an idiot I was being not to get a vaccine -- children are entitled to be nags and pests to their parents, as sort of a karmic payback for all the steering we did to them when they were in middle school.
But reaching down into the murky instincts to something that is as fundamental as the desire to see the living proof that something of you will live on (in a descendant) as you are approaching the Big Darkness (which is pretty close at age 78) for me crosses right over the line, it's a form of manipulation that to me would feel not a whole lot different from threatening to withhold food and water, and however much my daughter cared about my health I trust she would consider certain methods of applying pressure simply off the table, out of respect for me as a person.
I don't know if that helps at all, because it's just my personal viewpoint, and certainly your situation will be uniquely different. The only thing I think I can say that's useful is to bear in mind that for the old, there can be, indeed must be, many things that are more important than sheer length of lifespan. Dignity and respect are high on the list.
Maybe one thing you can try is to have a frank conversation with her that is close to what you posted: "Aunty, I'm so worried about your risks with the new variants and all, I thought briefly of saying I wanted you to get vaccinated before you could see [baby name]. I decided that doing that was too unkind, or disrespectful to you, but just by the fact that I even *thought* about it should tell you how worried about you I am. Could you not please reconsider?" If my daughter said that to me, I'd just go get a vaccine so she would stop worrying, even if I thought they were useless or even slightly dangerous, because it doesn't degrade my sense of dignitity -- indeed, it's *elevated* because I'm doing her a favor, taking care of her, and I spent 20 years doing that and haven't left the instinct to do so fully behind.
Clearly I don't know how far away your baby is, but it might be worth factoring in to any calculation the time delays of vaccination: dose1 + 4weeks + dose2 + 14-21 days for effectiveness = 2 months, realistically.
I'm absolutely astonished by the other responses here.
You can and must enforce your personal boundaries around who gets to meet your baby, from "people who washed their hands right before holding the baby" to "people who have received X, Y, and Z vaccines." If you don't trust individuals to fully comply with your boundaries, you're absolutely entitled to watch them wash their hands, or see proof of a vaccine card.
You would not be "blackmailing" your aunt by kindly but firmly presenting your conditions for meeting your baby. On the contrary, she would be the one emotionally blackmailing *you* were she to insist on seeing your baby while violating your safety concerns.
Present your aunt your terms, and allow her the free choice to either accept your conditions or decline.
A hypothetical script might be:
"Hi Beloved Aunt, we're excited to have you meet Baby! Just to let you know, I [and Co-parent, if applicable], am/are following our doctor's instructions to not introduce Baby to anyone who doesn't have documentation that they've been fully vaccinated against [full list of vaccines]. We miss you and would love to have you, but we'll understand if you need to decline."
Keep the tone upbeat and loving, but be firm and don't negotiate. If she declines to abide by your terms, be loving, but regretful at *her* choice.
For what it's worth, I told my high risk 70-something parents that I would cancel my trip to see them in a couple of weeks if they didn't get their second COVID vaccine doses (delayed first by circumstances outside of their control, then laziness / red tribe dismissiveness) by the end of last week.
Those were my boundaries, to protect *myself* from the potential regret of knowing I had infected them by not doing what I reasonably could to protect them from the Delta variant.
Luckily, my parents prioritized seeing me over continuing to be lazy / dismissive. Now I can see them without worry, and they can be as protected as possible.
Gently tell your aunt your terms, and allow her to make the choice whether to comply with them or do without seeing the baby.
The person themselves says that the health risks for the baby is a relatively insignificant concern, compared to her worry for the aunt, which is perfectly rational given the risks of COVID to the elderly (high) and to babies (low). Vaccinations don't necessarily protect people from getting and passing it on either and they are less effective for the elderly. So if you really wanted to reduce the risk to the baby, a quarantine would be more logical.
You seem to not be addressing the actual concerns of the person asking the question, but what your own concerns are or would be. Yet you are not the person asking the question.
Also, your own experience deviates in some significant ways (your parents didn't seem to have significant resistance and you were the one traveling).
> Those were my boundaries, to protect *myself* from the potential regret of knowing I had infected them by not doing what I reasonably could to protect them from the Delta variant.
Yet the OP wouldn't be in this situation, because if the aunt were to be infected, this would most likely be along the way & it would be her decision to travel (and her actions, to make this happen).
The OP also gave no indication that she shares your reasoning/psychology.
The OP is contemplating an action I wholeheartedly endorse and successfully used myself on older, mildly vax resistant people (in a slightly different situation).
That means the OP at least shares *some* of my basic reasoning and psychology, otherwise the strategy never would have occurred to them.
I'm affirming that the OP should go with the instincts that made them contemplate this strategy in the first place, and I'm providing as much reasoning as possible to support them, especially given the (to me odd) majority of comments insisting that it would be literally morally wrong to place conditions on their next encounter.
Hosts place all sorts of conditions guests that come into their home, from whether they should wear their shoes inside to the amount of time they're willing to host them, to not letting the cat out of the house even if she really looks like she wants to go, to "please stay out of the dining room this afternoon while I have a confidential work Zoom meeting." And as a new parent, the OP has an especially acceptable cultural right to set and enforce conditions around handling the baby.
It's very possible the aunt would push back against another adult but compromise when there's a baby on the line, which would be the best situation for all involved.
And if the aunt doesn't want to compromise, the OP still always has the option of changing their mind.
> the OP at least shares *some* of my basic reasoning and psychology, otherwise the strategy never would have occurred to them.
Every normal person has that, because it is also the basis for parenting, as well as group norms. Wanting to control others because you think you know better than them, is not some weird desire. That doesn't mean you should necessarily act on that desire.
I can easily offer a different interpretation similar in kind to the one you made, but favoring the opposite behavior, by pointing out that by asking, the OP indicates that they have a feeling that this desire crosses a limit.
> majority of comments insisting that it would be literally morally wrong to place conditions on their next encounter.
It's not such a black/white situation. Some conditions are fine, but others cross the line. If you demand that your grandparents eat a couple of worms before they get to see their grandchild, they are presumably going to be quite upset and others will presumably be on their side (unless your grandparents are birds).
Typically, the conditions you place on family have to be somewhat reasonable in their eyes, or they may get very upset.
> And as a new parent, the OP has an especially acceptable cultural right to set and enforce conditions around handling the baby.
Again, the OP has indicated that this reason is very insignificant compared to the concern about the aunt. It comes across as a rationalization that wouldn't cause the OP to demand anything if the life of the aunt wasn't at risk. That you focusing on this, seems to be more of a case where you project your own feelings on the OP, than pay attention to their actual stated concerns.
> there's a baby on the line
If that would actually be the concern, then there are other options than just getting aunt vaccinated. In fact, getting vaccinated still leaves a risk of getting COVID and passing it on, so there is actually a safer alternative (a quarantine).
Demanding a specific solution by claiming it is for one reason, while you don't propose or even accept a solution that addresses that concern better, seems manipulative.
There are situations where manipulation is preferable, but it's a risky game, as well as not being particularly moral, when the other person is reasonably able to come up with their own preferences (for a normal human, so the standard is low).
> And if the aunt doesn't want to compromise, the OP still always has the option of changing their mind.
That doesn't mean that the consequences are undone.
Fair enough, but I actually was genuinely astonished that *all* the people who had commented before I did were saying that it was literally morally wrong to deny access to a baby who would be at risk from not only COVID-19, but all the other stuff the OP said the aunt wasn't vaccinated for (flu, etc).
I just...I *really* wasn't expect that from this community of commentors, and when it was comment after comment with a suddenly completely alien worldview that didn't seem to value vaccines or boundaries...I was just actually astonished.
The question wasn't about the value of vaccines, though, and wasn't primarily about protecting the baby. If the baby's health had been the primary concern, I would have said sure, set whatever boundaries you want. Instead, the question was about withholding something from a relative to pressure them to do what you want "for their own good." That is indeed immoral, by my lights.
The acceptable level of risk is for the parent to decide. Caution about a baby's health isn't what I object to. Like I said in my original response, if OP can honestly say that the decision would be for the benefit of the baby, it would be fine.
This is a response to your post below, but I'm going up one level with this response so the thread doesn't get too hard to read on mobile. The moral principle informing the distinction between OP's baby and OP's aunt is, simply, that the latter is a presumably mentally competent adult. In general, respecting other people means accepting the choices they make for themselves, even when we disagree with those choices - at least insofar as those choices directly affect the person in question.
It's perfectly reasonable to say that certain behaviors present a threat to oneself or those one has responsibility for (e.g. a baby) and set boundaries accordingly. When my friend had a baby in January of 2020 just before Covid hit, for example, he told me I had to get a flu shot before I could meet him, which otherwise I likely wouldn't have bothered doing, and that was perfectly fine. (Yes, I should have gotten one anyway, but I'm lazy.)
It's not reasonable or respectful to refuse to accept someone's choice on the grounds that a different choice would benefit them more. This is unavoidable for children and the severely mentally handicapped, but it's not how we should treat those who are capable of taking care of themselves.
It's even worse to claim that someone's decisions about their own healthcare are actually yours to make because you would be sad if they died or something. That's disingenuous, it springs from an impulse to control and manipulate, and it's very very close to being outright psychological abuse. You have no right to impose your prudential decisions on others. Their choices are their own.
> Exactly how much does the ultimatum have to be for the benefit of the baby before it goes from unethical to ethical? 5%? 50% 80%?
Choosing an arbitrary percentage would be nonsensical. Imagine that the baby was your *only* concern, and ask whether you would still want to demand the vaccination then. You don't get to mix in any percentage of manipulating an adult relative for her own good. Answering this kind of hypothetical question honestly is very difficult, but it's what you have to do in order to treat all concerned with the respect and care they deserve.
Probably depends at least a little on the probability of and severity of the consequences, and on the means chosen to exert pressure. Is it moral to blackmail an ex with publishing a BDSM sex video in order to prevent her from taking up skydiving?
Isn't the whole purpose of Al-Anon to help loved ones refuse to assist addicts engage in objectionable behaviors by developing strong boundaries and literally telling them, "I love you, but no."
My understanding is that refusing financial support, shelter, and even basic attention is all part of the Al-Anon toolkit. "I'll hang up the phone if you call me drunk," and "you can't crash on my couch until you've been sober for X amount of time" is totally normal, and not considered manipulative or coercive.
And that's understandable! It's just a reminder to step back when you encounter that. :-) Being willing to face alien mindsets while controlling for recoil is a lot of what makes this place what it is. This is especially so when on the modern Internet so many people get conditioned to “outrage first, questions later”, and surprise-as-territory-claiming is a very common thing.
FWIW, I think I agree more than disagree with you here in terms of actions, but I also can imagine where the others are coming from. I place a very high value on familial bonds and willingness to compromise for them, and much less value on being able to unilaterally set individual boundaries than you seem to (along the lines of: I consider it an important stopgap, but in many cases more like a weapon that you pull out as a last resort, not the first determiner of how interactions work; that's not universal though, and especially they come into play a lot more in less-iterated interactions and in certain other critical situations)—but I also consider the pandemic enough of an overriding concern that I would lean toward applying firmer pressure to vaccinate in this case, and I do consider the rings-of-concern to favor the closer kin over the more distant in case of dispute, and I think if the parent *already* had that as a hard line (and especially if it were already known to be such) then it would definitely not be immoral to enforce it. (Comparatively, what you were suggesting reads to me as “you *should* have that boundary”, not “*if* you have that boundary, then”.)
I don't think I would say this in *direct* response because my meta-considerations also involve “not everyone has the kind of family structure I expect”, so there's an “it's not for me to judge” there…
It wouldn't take an unimaginable amount of shift to make me think differently. And I certainly wouldn't consider those hypothetical other me to “not value” vaccines or boundaries—just to place them differently within the mix of values.
Ah - I definitely didn't intend to do " surprise-as-territory-claiming," I was just *that* amazed that there were at least half a dozen comments unilaterally stating that it would be immoral/unethical/blackmail for the OP to follow through with the ultimatum she was contemplating.
You're right, though, in retrospect, some of the insistent tone in my first comment was over-correction for what felt like an alarming consensus condemning a valid and reasonable tool for enforcing a personal boundary. Add in that the OP said she was more concerned about her aunt than her baby - but that the baby was still a concern, if a lesser one! - and it's hard to factor the baby back out of the equation. After all, it wasn't just the COVID vaccine the aunt hadn't received; it was a lot of vaccines, including the flu vaccines and maybe even DTaP. Some of those vaccines aren't on a baby's schedule until well past the age I would consider "new" enough to be part of a "new baby visit yay!"
But the OP mentioned that she might have the third option of taking the baby to see the aunt once the baby is sufficiently vaccinated, so that's probably the best solution all around.
The “there may be other relevant vaccines involved in this, based on the aunt's overall attitude” is actually a very good point which I hadn't considered—I notice now that you mentioned it more abstractly in your earlier post, but I had taken that as a hypothetical generalization of the described situation rather than something that might be directly applicable. So it's good that you brought that up more explicitly.
The 'blackmail' word was used in the original post. She(?) admitted later that she was mostly concerned with her aunts health.
As a side note, I'm really impressed with the 'moral quandary' help here. I've got a divorce on the horizon, with a bunch of emotions attached.. angry, pity, duty... and it would be great to get input from this crowd. I think I might have to make a more anonymous account though.
With the caveat that I don't trust myself to extrapolate in a case here that's already occurred: I think so, but my response was also contextualized to the rest of the post following through on the strength of it—“you can and must”, etc. There's a fuzzy strength threshold at which there's a qualitative difference between “part of the natural reaction flow” and “implicitly trying to reset the accepted window”.
Thank you for sharing your experience with your parents, that's helpful to hear about. I haven't decided on a course of action yet, but one thing your comment illuminated for me is that my aunt--like your parents and many, many people--is not a particularly consistent or committed reasoner on this topic.
I wanted to keep the original post brief, but my aunt has said things that make me think she's avoiding the COVID vaccine more out of dismissiveness and annoyance than in order to be consistent with her principles. Her explicitly stated reason to avoid it is that it's not helpful or necessary (because it's not "natural"), but I don't think that paints the full picture. For example, she wasn't upset when I told her that *I* had gotten the vaccine. In fact, she even said something like "well, of course! You're pregnant, you can't take any chances!"
This comment, along with some others she's made, makes me think she might be more amenable to being "nudged" along than I would be if our positions were reversed.
Stupid phone browser. I wasn't able to see this response while I was typing my other one.
It doesn't sound like she's the toxic personality type I was discussing in the first part of the comment, so disregard that.
Just to simplify things:
Can you just blame it on your doctor? Like, actually ask their advice about a non-vaccinated person visiting the baby, and tell your aunt you have to go with whatever they said (which will likely be, 'only vaccinated or properly isolated people should handle the new-ish baby')?
It takes a lot of balls to get offended by a new parent just following doctor's orders.
Whoops. After this, no more phone browser replies.
I was saying, it takes an awful lot of balls to get offended over someone following a doctor's orders, and your aunt was supportive of you doing that in the past, so it seems like she might be supportive of it now.
Her not getting vaccinated is immoral, in my opinion at least an order of magnitude worse than emotionally pressuring someone into doing a beneficial thing.
Start by considering your framework. Is it acceptable to do a small bad thing to prevent a big bad thing? If not, then no you shouldn't pressure her to get the vaccine.
If so, then work out where you draw the line. Consider how many people she meets, and how likely she is to catch and/or spread COVID to others. Do the math, and decide if it's worth the price of feeling bad about pressuring her.
I'm curious about your definition of immoral (or criteria to consider something immoral). What makes her decision to not get vaccinated immoral? Would it be different if she were prone to allergic reactions or had some other reasoning behind not getting vaccinated? To jump ahead to possible future responses, what limiting factors do you consider before calling something immoral?
Getting vaccinated is extremely low cost, within rounding error of 0. It reduces the odds of inflicting significant pain on someone else by a large amount. In this case, benefit to other >>> cost to self. Therefore, failing to do it is immoral. This isn't a case where it's remotely close between the cost and the benefit. It's like if there was a button at your local pharmacy that you can press to save a life.
If you have an allergy or other health concern that raises the cost, then the comparison no longer holds and it stops being immoral to not get it. One reason why it is so vital that everyone who can safely get vaccinated does is to provide herd protection for those who can't.
For your follow up question, it's something that I don't have a clear answer to in most cases. In the vast majority of tradeoffs, the difference is small enough that I don't know how to judge ideals like self determination or respecting belief weighing against the benefits. I wouldn't support killing a healthy person to give their organs to other people, for example.
And to make another statement: I don't think that because something is immoral it should be legally required (You didn't say that I said this, but I'm addressing a common issue). I am very uncertain about how I feel about legally requiring vaccination in general, although I am more comfortable with requiring vaccination to engage in certain behaviors (e.g. I am fine with a stadium requiring proof of vaccination or health exemption as a condition for entering. I am uncomfortable with a state-backed mandate requiring you to get vaccination on penalty of fine or jail time)
Yeah I don't like the idea of 'blackmailing' with the baby visit. Does she have a doctor she sees who can talk about risks and benefits of the vaccine... The biggest (individual) benefit I see is that even if you get it the outcome is less severe. Lower chance of hospitalization. I think it would be better for you to talk about your concerns for her, and not your baby... since it seems that is your real concern, and talking about the baby is kinda a sideshow. Congrats on the new kid! BTW.
1. The Dublin LessWrong group would be delighted to have you! Would be surprised if covid were too bad here, given that vaccine coverage is now slightly higher than the US and hesitancy is low. We are small though, I suspect it would only be worth your time if you have friends in Ireland you want to meet.
2. My favourite SSC post of all time is your book review of that book about Herbert Hoover. You need to make a sequel! I feel sufficiently strongly about this that if you write it, I will redirect my yearly donations to a charity of your choice :)
Well, there are multiple times that you mention things that you didn't have enough time to mention, like the temple (?) and when he helped organise the WW2 food aid. You could also talk about how the author could possibly have come up with such wildly inflated estimates of Hoover's impact, and how his reputation was tarred by history etc.
"Hoover From Beyond The Grave: My Quest To Find A Reliable Medium" would be a fascinating jaunt and I'm sure *somebody* in Spiritualist circles *must* have tried communicating with the Great previously 😁
Hi Sam when does Dublin LW meet? I'll be in Dublin next weekend (6-7 Aug) visiting my highly irrational but lovely poet mum and happy to connect IRL if anyone's around... St Stephen's Green?
Hello. Our July meetup is on the 31st, so August one probably won't be for another while. If you want to come to our online discussions, or you will often be in Dublin in future, I can add you to the groupchat?
For meetups, DC has been hosting them for a while. We've done them inside the last couple inside because DC is miserable outside in the summer, and there have been no issues. Numbers are down a little from the beforetime (~20 people instead of ~30). We're definitely in favor of more advertisement for the meetups, and if you're in DC you should definitely be coming! Sign up for the facebook group or mailing list here:
Commenters treat them fairly differently. Commenters are more forgiving of a woman doing it and view her motives as different. Eg on the debater-girlfriend: “[she] isn't interested in winning, she's interested in learning what you believe”, whereas on debater-boyfriend: “He wants to be the top dog. He wants to pick fights because then he can feel dominant. Content doesn't matter, he is trying to create situations where he feels strong... probably to compensate for something.”
Most commenters think the debater-boyfriend should be broken up with immediately or at least given an ultimatum. Debater girlfriend gets some mean comments (“She sounds insufferable to be around. I'm guessing she doesn't have a lot of friends”), but much fewer commenters recommend breaking up with her (that is famously quite rare for r/relationships, they are pretty trigger-happy about saying “dump the bitch/bastard”).
For me this is very interesting because I am very much the person being complaining about (hey, I’m on SSC!). Perhaps not entirely: I don’t *like* upsetting people, so I put effort into being more sensitive than is being described in these threads. And I don’t play devil’s advocate, unless a broad definition of that term is applied. So maybe I am or maybe I’m not like these people (though no-one's broken up with me about it).
Also, I want a relationship with someone exactly like debater-girlfriend. In my adult life, in all the relationships I’ve ended, lack of respectful disagreements has been a factor.
My model for both, which a fair few of the commenters go along with, is:
“Not everyone is interested in respectful disagreements. Many people who have opinions just want to keep those opinions, and to make statements but not have them be questioned, or only be questioned in a way that creates opportunities to affirm them. But some of us do; hearing that a person we like disagrees with us makes us eager to listen the reasons and find counter-arguments to them. It is a hobby, and as with any hobby, it can be frustrating for your partner to try to force you to engage in that hobby if you aren’t interested in it yourself. And it may indeed be the case that debate is just a status/class signalling exercise (again, just like other hobbies) but that does not change the fact that we learn a lot from it.”
Sometimes I worry like that that model is too blind to the way that status/control works in romantic relationships as opposed to friendships (most of my conversations with my platonic friends are debates). Many commenters on the debater-boyfriend thread are pretty opposed to the guy doing anything other than "having her back", which I think is sad.
But on the other hand, the debater-girlfriend thread exists. And I didn’t find that many other debater-boyfriend threads, so there might not even be that much gender disparity. Though I didn’t spend long looking.
I think the double standard is bad. They’re right that both of those people should break up with their partners, or not expect them to change. But it’s wrong that so many more of them say the dude’s behaviour is immoral than the woman’s.
I don't really see a double standard here. There is a similarity: both people are being described as wanting to argue too much. But the boyfriend is also described as being condescending, arrogant, and generally a jerk about it. The girlfriend isn't doing that. There are perfectly gender-neutral reasons to think the boyfriend sounds like a total asshat, and the girlfriend sounds like...someone who would be to some people's taste and not others'.
It's true, "condescending" is only applied to the boyfriend, and only he is said to have implied the posting partner is being boring.
On the other hand something that's said of the girlfriend but not the boyfriend is "she will sometimes randomly pull a controversial topic out of the blue and want to discuss it with me for a long time" - that is extremely edgelord and aggressive. Debating-girlfriend would do that if she wasn't herself quite bored.
It's a bit tricky because the complaining-girlfriend has more emphatic prose than complaining-boyfriend (all caps, exclamation marks, including on the quotes she uses).
Suppose a fake post was made which was an adaptation of the complaining-girlfriend's post, wording slightly changed to deflect suspicion. But gender-swapped. Would you expect the responses to be similar to what complaining-girlfriend's post got?
I don't see pulling a controversial topic out of the blue and wanting to discuss it for a long time as intrinsically aggressive. I suppose it could be, depending on how it was done, but the girlfriend is explicitly described as *not* having arguments just because she wants to win, but instead in a spirit of genuinely wanting an interchange of ideas and wanting to understand him better. Those are not bad motivations, even if it's too much and it's annoying. The boyfriend, by contrast, is using arguments as a bullying, dominating tactic. That makes a very, very big difference to how it feels.
I do suspect that you would see at least *some* double-standard if you swapped the genders, though, if nothing else because I bet some female readers would read their own bitter experiences with condescending and aggressive men into the description, even if it wasn't explicitly described that way. (I say this because I fear I might do that.) Still, I don't think a double-standard is what you're seeing in these actual posts.
"genuinely wanting an interchange of ideas [...] by contrast, is using arguments as a bullying, dominating tactic. That makes a very, very big difference to how it feels."
I agree but I think it's more complicated
"the girlfriend is explicitly described as *not* having arguments just because she wants to win"
It's not completely explicit. That is the interpretation many commenters have. But he says "She has always been really interested in debates and arguments and changing my views on things", and she's clearly "not dropping the conversation" a lot, in addition to the "apropos of nothing" controversial conversation.
That is consistent with her wanting to dominate. He isn't talking about her about her as if he feels it's that way... AND even if it IS that way, that's not the thing he's complaining about (he just wants to talk about other things).
There's subtlety here, because I think men are more likely to be doing it for domination - some amount of double-standard makes sense. I'm guilty of projecting onto the complaints about the debater-boyfriend too*.
Fundamentally I think the genuine interchange/domination is a good distinction, and we should go for the genuine stuff. But it's always possible to cast genuine interchange as domination (look on r/sneerclub). And we shouldn't forget there is always a bit of domination that motivates the discussion https://www.overcomingbias.com/2020/11/prestige-is-mob-enforced-dominance.html for example when someone's mind is change
*"He could argue about whether the sky is blue or cyan" - really, lady? Could he? Or could it possibly be the case that you found something he said to be splitting-hairs-ish, but it was actually quite key to showing that something you said was false, and you remember it as a dumb conversation in retrospect but you want to have some reason to be annoyed about his style, even though we know you participated in the disagreement at the time (because it takes two to tango!)
None of this bothers me because I DO have a double standard. I think women behave differently from men because that's their nature, as well as the reality of culture-driven gender differences. So I interpret actions with that in mind,
> Eg on the debater-girlfriend: “[she] isn't interested in winning, she's interested in learning what you believe”, whereas on debater-boyfriend: “He wants to be the top dog. [...]”
That part strikes me as somewhat reasonable. gender role incentives do shape the ways we play our social games.
A woke person can attribute it to patriarchal roles, a non-woke person can attribute it to innate difference between sexes, but either way the prior probability of a man doing something is different from a prior probability of a woman doing the same thing. Given different priors, receiving the same evidence should not lead to the same conclusions.
Inapplicable for me because I never argue about decisions that actually affect me. If my partner wants something they tend to get it! If it's political/academic on the other hand...
That’s an old joke. A man is asked who makes the decisions in the relationship. He says the wife makes the minor ones, where to go on holiday, what to eat, where the kids go to school, what bills to pay and he makes the big decisions - whether we should have left Afghanistan, whether to lockdown again, how to deal with Putin and China.
I keep thinking about this joke and how you must have told it wrong, swapping "major and minor", because that's how it actually is. But maybe you didn't!
That's interesting. Come to think of it, I'm in a marriage of two people who are extremely good at arguing, and we don't seem to make any key decisions on the basis of argument either. Instead, it seems to be based on who is more significantly affected by the matter, or on who cares more. There's an expression of positions and then the person who cares less immediately recognizes that fact and gives way. That probably is wiser than deciding by argument.
Reddit advice is generally garbage anyway. I enjoy going on r/{AITA relationships relationship_advice} and laughing at responses sometimes. The GF’s post does say a lot more negative about the bf though which could be part of the cause, but the subs do tend to be more favorable towards women than men (very trad!)
> This can happen with any small minor thing, she just wants to know more and more about why I feel a certain way, and it gets annoying bc I don't even like to debate or argue or even think that much
Greta absolutely deserves better.
> This is a good example of how consent applies outside of sexual contexts. Tell her she needs to make sure she has enthusiastic consent from you before going into conversations that drain you.
European here (and from a country that got a pretty big COVID spike recently). I would go to an in person indoor meeting in september. I would be slightly more comfortable in October, but that's largely paranoia at this point (I think).
Definitely not irresponsible to hold or promote one at this point.
I'm looking for a fall sublet/rental in Washington DC for the fall.
Briefly about me: I'm a mid-20s male PhD student in Planetary Science, spending the fall working on space policy on capitol hill. I currently live in a group house (5 BR, 6 people) and I love it, so I'm hoping for something similar in DC. Lately I spend most of my time biking, and I like just about everything outdoors. I love baseball and theater, board games and card games. I really like to cook but wouldn't be surprised if I end up eating out a lot since I'll actually have access to worthwhile restaurants. I'm very respectful of common-space cleanliness (sometimes my own room gets a bit messier), and I like to think I'm generally quite easygoing.
Budget is a mildly-flexible $1k/month, and I'm planning to be around from mid/late-September through mid/early-December. I'd like to live somewhere that makes it easy to commute to work on the hill, so something on the red/green/yellow line would be good, and/or somewhere close enough to bike easily.
[I posted this in the previous open thread and on DSL, I won't post it again, sorry if this is already getting spammy, but I'm worried I got to the previous open thread too late]
- March 2020: covid hits and the UK screws up the initial response
- Nov 2020: Cummings quits / gets fired at no10
Whatever he tried to do within the government: is there some other interpretation than "he failed"?
I should add that I'm not interested in a heated debate our a shouting match. I was very skeptical of Cummings approach from the beginning and instead of being "told you so" I'd like to hear better takes on this.
You could go with the interpretation "he had a plan but Covid came too soon and caused too much distraction". If that isn't what you mean by "he failed".
I think the fairest interpretation is "Who knows?". In general, it appears that Cummings' aims were targeted at the Civil Service and its effectiveness, rather than broad policy. The Civil Service is opaque at the best of times, and with any changes likely to be long term in impact, it is both difficult and too early to judge.
> I was very skeptical of Cummings approach from the beginning and instead of being "told you so" I'd like to hear better takes on this.
Any attempts to significantly change government is going to fail 9 times out of 10 and circumstances matter so much, that failure or success can at most be partially attributed to the person who seeks to create change. Macmillan famously might have said that the greatest influence on his administration was: "Events, dear boy, events." And COVID definitely was an event. I don't see how any politician can reasonably be blamed for failing to create long-term change during the crisis. And Cummings wasn't even a politician with actual direct power, but an advisor.
Note that in his writings about his previous advisership, for Gove, Cummings identified the constant crisis management as one of the main problems. He noted that the media would assume all kinds of complex strategies behind what the government did, when it was often just a lower-ranked individual who made something up on the fly, which then became a scandal, where the government was utterly bewildered about what even happened. The result was that the government was constantly managing crises, without ever addressing structural problems, after a solid analysis.
Cummings has said several times that he considers himself to be short on important skills, but that he's mostly doing what he does for the lack of anyone better. I'd expect him to agree that he failed, but to argue that at least he tried.
Ultimately, there are different kinds of failure. You've got the failure where the job is easy and any failure is due to an error by the person, but also a failure where unpredictable and unavoidable circumstance have such an impact, that it is hard to imagine another outcome. I think that this is closer to the latter.
Not that I think that it would have been likely that Cummings would have succeeded without COVID, but now he didn't have a chance to get anything done of his own plans.
Not directly a thought, but I found this video to be very interesting and insightful into what happened inside the UK government during the initial COVID response:
"Former government advisor Dominic Cummings testifies to joint parliamentary committee"
His failure and exit from government weren’t really down to a failure of ideas or a failure to reform the UK state etc etc, it’s a much more boring reason - he fell out with his boss, the PM over office politics.
Unfortunately his credibility with the wider public and the political classes got shredded by his breach of lockdown rules - he drove the length of the country whilst infected - so his (in my opinion anyway) interesting critiques of the way the UK government functions will be lost.
"he fell out with his boss, the PM over office politics"
Strictly speaking, not even that. He committed one of the all-time classical blunders, only slightly more foolish than starting a land war in Asia: he got into a fight with the boss' piece over which of them had more control over him.
Or maybe the mistake was to think there's a shortcut in the long march through the institutions: the way to influence the PM is not to be their adviser but their PPE Prof.
If you have some time, really read this one. It's like a blueprint of what you would like to do to prepare for crisis situations (like .. um 2020 but without knowing where disaster will strike?). I believe for various reasons that a deep dive on what happened would be interesting, but I don't have the time and background to do it myself. Instead, I'll lay my motivations out here for you to read. I hope someone bites the bullet and posts a long writeup here or on the subreddit.
So here are my various reasons for why I think a better understanding would be interesting:
- I don't think we can trust Cummings very much. Everyone can agree that he's a master at spin doctoring and no matter whether you like him or not, only takeing his word into account gives you probably a very skewed idea of what actually happend. I'd be motivated to read an honest post-mortem by Cummings of why his plans failed but I don't expect this to arrive any time soon (maybe in a few decades when all the dust has settled?)
- Looking at Cummings' original motivation, plans and the setting he got (a boss that defended and maybe even approved of all his eccentricness for more than one year?): I believe his failure in 2020 is reasonably strong evidence for scepticism on his approach of very lean and data-driven governing. In a polemic way: He had a year to prepare, then he was put to the test and failed to provide actual benefits - I can't see any case in the near future with better or even comparable starting positions to re-try this.
- I understand that Cummings has a very sceptical view of big government (I remember him somewhere on youtube arguing that the government would run more efficiently if you fired half the employees). My position would be a "Chesterton's fence"-view, arguing that bureaucracy has an important role that cannot be replicated or outperformed by lean/agile approach (whatever that means), so I don't think you an get away with this unless accepting major downsides. Instead of starting a heated debate on fundamental positions, I'd be more interested in a case study of how and where the Cummings-prefered lean approach can coexist with bureaucracy (as this would be the obvious solution to this dilemma). Now Cummings did provide one and I'd be intrigued to know more.
That said, looking at the previous responses, I'm not too optimistic. As far as I can tell, a few of us should've followed Cummings more closely (if you read the linked article above, you'll notice that he directly linked to SSC and Scott mentions his Substack in the last link post, so there should be some overlap, right?). Not getting any responses with what I'm looking surprised me and I don't really know what to think of it.
Cummings certainly succeeded in putting Barnard Castle on the map 🤓 he really shouldn't have lied through his teeth about that it made him a national laughing stock 😂
If you are interested in deepening your Stoic practice or learning more about Stoicism I co host a weekly zoom study group. We are working from this book. We just started week 2. Comment if you want an invite to the group.
I think I'm 50/50 on whether I'd be comfortable attending an indoor meetup in September. Case rates seem to be going down over the last handful of days, but it would be a lot of people and I think I'd have difficulty understanding conversation if we were masked.
(If I am comfortable going I'm the most likely organizer. We have an existing group "London rationalish" which used to be London LW before LW kind of died for a few years.)
I would be delighted to attend an in-person meet up in the US. Ideal would be a maskless meetup where everyone’s vaccination cards are checked at the door. Slightly less ideal is a maskless meetup with no vaccination checks. Even less ideal is a mask-enforced meetup but I’ll still attend one.
I consider it responsible to hold meetups in any countries where adults are able to walk into their nearest pharmacy and get vaccinated. So it’s fine in the UK but would be irresponsible in Mexico or Taiwan.
I'll +1 this rather than adding my own comment. I was scrolling down to see if anyone was of like mind with me.
I'm in the US; you can get a free vaccine at a Dodgers game (they even give you tickets for it). I think anyone who wants one can get one, and being vaccinated myself my concern about catching or spreading the virus is much reduced.
I also prefer no masks. I feel like I learned how much we depend on facial expression for communication during the long masking.
I sometimes thought about attending a meetup pre-pandemic, but never quite convinced myself to go. That degree of engagement is not going to push me over the edge into attending in a pandemic world. So, in a word, no.
I don't know what the covid data locally will look like in September, and I remain convinced that the PTB are choosing not to record things I'd very much like to know to judge actual risks. I can't predict how I'd feel about any indoor gathering of strangers that far into the future.
FWIW, I am currently visiting grocery stores in person, after a long period of getting groceries delivered instead. And I never stopped visiting medical facilities in person.
I am officially fully vaccinated, but my immune system was not at its best when I got the two Pfizer shots. I'm also 63 years old.
Probably I'm being overly paranoid, but OTOH, I'm an introvert; I don't really mind interacting with strangers only outdoors.
FWIW, my employer ratcheted back its demand for in-person work starting at the beginning of September; it's now holding off until October. And I'm currently off work on disability, contemplating retirement rather than return (NOT because of covid), so this is a data point rather than a concern.
My concern is primarily with the unvaccinated breeding new and improved variants that break through vaccinations more readily, but secondarily with data not being gathered on breakthrough cases, leading me to mistrust those who, having chosen not to collect the data that would provide evidence for their assertions, now assure me that I'm perfectly safe.
I had terrible food poisoning a few months ago, the worst I've ever had, from some leftover chicken. I decided to stop eating chicken forever as a result (so far, so good). It's an idea I had entertained for a while, for ethical reasons, but the misery I experienced gave me a renewed appreciation for suffering, and between the desire to not experience it (probably avoidable by just being more discriminating with leftovers) and to not inflict it, I got over the hump and made a decision I feel good about.
It's a pretty major part of most religions, but experiencing suffering really is necessary, for many or most people (including me) to really take suffering as seriously in decision making as its moral weight demands.
Somehow this seems obvious now, and much less so before I was sick. I wonder if we've become so distanced from suffering that much of our (the average Western person's) moral philosophy has been built entirely upon higher rungs of Maslow's hierarchy, resulting in some odd ideological conflicts.
I can definitely relate to this—but at the same time it very much seems like our culture has become *much* more sensitized to suffering, and much more motivated to prevent/not inflict it, as we’ve become *less* surrounded by it due to the medical revolution/Great Enrichment of modernity.
One of the big important lessons to be learned from suffering a bunch is that suffering is not that big a deal. Safety produces fragility; you can't possibly believe that misgendering is a serious issue if your job is to sweep mines in Cambodia.
I have been thinking a lot about this, especially with some of the discussion here regarding PTSD. Plus I've been re-reading Vietnam War novels (Matterhorn and Fields of Fire) and thinking about this. My grandparents were children in the Depression, then saw all kinds of horror and experienced real suffering in WWII. (My grandfather was at Pearl Harbor, my other grandfather in North Africa and Sicily.)
Point being, my life has been easy, and my children have even more comfortable lives. But I think we're less likely to give active service to other people, less happy, more prone to mental illness, etc. Maybe we just missed the chance to suffer for something we believe in.
I'm also a believing Latter-day Saint, and in that tradition we honor the suffering of our pioneer ancestors, many of whom died on the way to Salt Lake. We also promise to follow Christ, who is the archetype of suffering (and the overcoming of suffering.)
I certainly don't think we should invite suffering, but I think we ought to sacrifice something. It's something I try to teach my children in small ways. For instance, Mormons fast once a month, and I encourage my children to participate in that. Being hungry is good for the soul.
I very much relate to this. I had quite bad food poisoning 5 times from fried chicken (4 times from KFC alone!).
Fried chicken is by far what I miss most as a vegetarian, but recalling the many instances of food poisoning is one of the easiest ways to give me additional strength here. Well, that was more useful early on in my vegetarianism. After over a decade meat has stopped registering in my mind as an option that is selectable (which is great! I wish I could do this for more things I don't want to do).
Well the idea of CM seems to be just doing things that work, regardless of your epistemics.
"Chaos magic thus takes an explicitly agnostic position on whether or not magic exists as a supernatural force, with many chaos magicians expressing their acceptance of a psychological model as one possible explanation."
My impression is that Chaos magic (or magick, if they want to be extra about it) would be very open to such an angle, as their position (from what I can see) is "What works, works; why it works, we aren't hung up on that".
So if you want to invoke the Great And Dread Mickey Mouse in a working, you go! (so long as you are certain you are well warded from the Lawyers).
The problem being everyone thinks what they do works, because they’re doing it, so CM can just take sentences with literally no meaning like “thinking things makes them happen!! Think you’ll get money you’ll get money!” and then use usual woo nonsense to get individuals to believe it, and then because it “worked” they used epistemologically agnostic rationalist methods!!1!! The actual content of Chaos Magick is basically a twist on The Secret but with cool aesthetics.
The steelman of Chaos Magic would be something like: rituals or symbols have psychological impact on us, let's reseach which forms have the greatest impact. Like, if you have some goal, and you believe that being reminded regularly of the goal would increase your chance of actually following it, then it would make sense to make a symbol representing the goal and put it on a visible place.
I guess it would be similar to placebo research. As far as I know, people found out that larger pills have stronger placebo effect than smaller pills. (As usual, not sure whether this finding survived replication.) Maybe we could find out that some symbols have stronger effect than some other symbols, too.
CM is complete wootherapy meaningless word salad though. If you wanna explore ritual, do ... actual ritual. Figure out how to factor out the Xtianity from the Latin Rite and make a Nrx Rite or Church of Yud Prayer something. Resurrect a Roman cult.
"Figure out how to factor out the Xtianity from the Latin Rite "
I am biting my tongue *so hard* about this in order to repress my first snarky response, as that would be an ecumenical matter. So sticking with goring my own ox, there are plenty of the TLM/SSPX types who would tell you that the Novus Ordo already has done that 😂
I’d love more snark! And I still to an extent don’t get the point of speaking in Latin to people who don’t know it. But I really mean to keep the aesthetic ritual part without the Christian part - then again, just say a prayer to Jupiter in Latin, nobody will be able to tell.
If the Novus Ordo options are chosen to maximize its similarity to the TLM then Catholicity is certainly not factored out. But no one says the NO ad orientem and in Latin, along with a number of other things. Even though they could and should.
You know, the first time I read this I didn’t expand rat to rationalist. It read really funny that way. Had to look up Chaos Magic. Are making a joke anyway? Sometimes I’m pretty sure people are pulling my leg.
I just listened to Lex Fridman interview Bret Weinstein and found the Weinstein's views on vaccination inconsistent and frustrating. Here's a brief summary:
1) He thinks we still have an opportunity to eradicate SARS-Cov-2 and should try to (I agree).
2) He has concerns about the possible effects of the mRNA and even the viral-vector vaccines. A steelman of his concern goes something like: "Because both the mRNA vaccine and the viral-vector vaccine are narrowly targeted at the spike protein, it does not provide as good immunity as real infection. In addition, this narrow focus introduces selection pressure on the virus to mutate. If we had deployed the virus before the pandemic was raging, it would be a different story, as the virus would not have an opportunity to reproduce with that selection pressure."
I disagree with this -- why does he not have this concern for other widely used vaccines, such as the flu, the measles, or other viruses that are already with us? I've read estimates that the vaccine is likely more effective against variants than natural immunity (partially because the dose is quite large), but admittedly the data is early. More to the point, many more studies reliably show that >99.95% of people hospitalized for COVID did not take the vaccine, and I presume some percentage may have been infected before.
3) He has a concern that the vaccination may induce antibody-dependent enhancement, making a later infection worse than it would have been with no infection. I am not aware of _any_ evidence showing this, if someone knows of some, could you kindly link it?
4) He feels it's borderline unethical to vaccinate children because they fare so much better than older people. I think a steelman would be "Our goal is herd immunity, not necessarily vaccination. We should let children develop her immunity naturally because so few children have problems getting COVID". It seems to me this argument directly contradicts his first point, which is that we should try to eradicate the disease. Eradication is more likely the more quickly we increase overall immunity, and vaccinating children helps this.
I haven't heard the arguments, but perhaps it's easier to evolve to evade a vaccine targeting the spike protein only (as only the spike protein needs to change) than a vaccine containing the entire virus, or all parts of it (a traditional attenuated or inactivated virus vaccine).
It might well be, but the problem (for the virus) is that the spike protein has to match up rather closely with the human ACE2 receptor for the virus to make entry to the cell, so that puts pretty stringent limits on how far it can evolve before it not only evades the immune system but fails to bind effectively to the ACE2 receptor.
(Uninformed speculation:) Some other coronaviruses (SARS v1 and a common human coronavirus) also bind to the ACE2 receptor, but I'm unaware that there is significant cross-immunity.
Also, I assume that something naturally binds to this receptor, so if we created immunity against anything that binds to it, we'd create autoimmunity.
(The terminology is confusing, as a layman. ACE2 is a protein. I assumed that ACE2 was what binds to an ACE2 receptor. But if I understand correctly, ACE2 is actually the receptor itself, and I don't know what binds to it. It seems like when they say X-receptor, X can be either the molecule that constitutes the receptor itself, or the molecule that binds to it.)
I remember hearing him argue that the spike protein itself was harmful, so that would explain why he was so against mRNA vaccines, but I wasn't clear on why he would treat the other COVID (viral vector) vaccines differently from what we used prior to COVID. And I don't know if there are any in development of the sort he's said he's waiting for.
It seems somewhat convoluted and not understood in detail tbh, but intramuscular vaccine vs vaccine in lungs and the spike protein being produced a lot by the virus vs less vaccine seems like a win for the vaccine safety.
If I was to baselessly speculate, what happens to the ionizable lipids that make the nanoparticles in the body? Where do they go? Are they excreted? Do they stick around? That seems like one of the few “safety concerns” I can come up with that isn’t facially stupid. However they already chose said lipids to not be toxic, and it’s probably fine, and anyway if there was much bad we’d probably have seen it already with 100M vaccinated. Interestingly, the lipid nanoparticle isn’t like a lipid bilayer surrounding water with rna, but instead a nanoparticle of solid lipid and rna, at least according to a Derek Lowe commenter.
As far as I can tell skimming through the painful English translation of a Japanese study on the pharmacokinetics of ALC-0315 that apparently was part of Pfizer's application for approval, the half life is about a week, and it mostly concentrates in the liver (of course), and the key degradation step seems to be hydrolysis of the two ester links holding it together. The resulting (somewhat peculiar) fatty acids might be further metabolized by any number of metabolic processes, e.g. beta oxidation, or perhaps they are now soluble enough to just be excreted directly in the urine.
5) He recommends people who have not yet had the vaccine but have had COVID take Ivermectin, due to some studies (small and inconclusive, I would argue) showing promise as an antiviral. I don't know enough here to have a high confidence on a view, but I guess I'm not aware of evidence that vaccination of those who have had COVID-19 has been a problem. Can anyone point me to information on this?
Between 2 and 5 peeps per million people vaccinated have serious adverse (i.e. hospitalization) side effects. Ivermectin studies are not very solid (but they are suggestive). But is it better to vax and avoid infection, or not vax hope that Ivermectin can keep you from dying. To vax or not to vax? that is the question. Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer the slings and arrows of innumeracy, or take arms against a sea data, and by analyzing them end doubt.
Vaccines often provide better immunity than natural infection, e.g. due to the use of adjuvants. I don't know that much about the Covid vaccines, but the people who developed them must have been aware that coronavirus immunity is typically short-lived, so there would have at least been a motivation to try to boost immunity beyond the natural level.
> Because both the mRNA vaccine and the viral-vector vaccine are narrowly targeted at the spike protein, it does not provide as good immunity as real infection
Pfizer moderna and many others have MUCH better immunity than other vaccines we still use f.ex. the flu, so this is not a good criticism
> In addition, this narrow focus introduces selection pressure on the virus to mutate
Immunology is hard. Statements like this are often just untrue, no matter how good it sounds. Unless he backed this up with a lot of evidence (and a few study abstracts that sound good is not a lot of evidence) then it is meaningless. “Immunology is where intuition goes to die”. That said, I am not an immunologist, so it’s possible, but as a general statement it seems off.
3 again same, possible but it’s just a random idea without very good evidence. You could make similar random cases that people getting the virus would be worse because immune response is stronger which induces harder selection pressure to mutate; and more people getting it means more mutations and less bottlenecks in spreading. Which is also unsupported!
So yeah, but also his other points are ridiculous too - ivermectin does not have good evidence that it works, existing evidence is well within the spectrum of past drugs that have disappeared (azithromycin, hcq, but the real comparison is just drug development in general). Many of the other stuff he says Covid wise is crankish as well.
re #2 — Sorry, but vaccine induced immunity (in most people) produces much higher serum neutralizing antibody levels than an actual SARS-CoV-2 infection — this has been derived from antibody titer levels of the post-infected vs the post-vaxxed. If you insist upon a link, I'll dig for it in my 500+ COVID-19 bookmarks (Arrrgghhhh!).
Plus, most of the mutations in SARS-CoV-2 are in the spike protein (suggesting a selective pressure to make it the RBD and FCS regions more infective. There have been some mutations in other regions of the genome, but those don't seem to affect infectiousness or resistance to the antibodies.
re #3 — yes, that's a theory. However, I'll point out at the B.1.617.2, P1, and B.1.351 variants, which are the most common variants today worldwide, all recently developed in countries with low vaccination rates (India, Brazil, and South Africa respectively). I don't think the data supports his fears.
re #4 — Delta (B.1.617.2) is sending younger cohorts to the hospital (presumably because the viral loading levels ramp up fast, and this increases the infectivity, but also triggers cytokine storms in younger people (data preliminary, though). But even if you vaccinate all adults, theoretically the virus will evolve to use kids as the host. Personally, once the safety data is in for kids under twelve, I'm all vaccinating them (unless the data shows there's an abnormally high incidence of adverse effects).
Also, herd immunity may be a myth with a Coronavirus like SARS-CoV-2. I discussed it above.
If you have some genetics under your belt, you might find these to sites to be useful...
At https://outbreak.info/ you can enter its Pango lineage identifier (i.e. B.1.1.7, B.1.351, etc.) under the Variants search section and get report on the mutations on which part of the virus they occurred on. The S section is the spike protein...
There was a neat way to line up these mutation charts for all the lineages side by side, but I can't figure out how to do it right now. Anyway, it showed that most of the mutations were taking place on the spike protein or near the spike protein. And the same mutations were happing in different combinations for different lineages.
Nextstrain dot org gives you a great lineage tree that shows you every variant and sub-variant that's been detected so far.
Covariants dot org gives you some good summary info on the variants. If you click on a particular strain, it takes you to the cov-lineages dot org website that gives you a detailed breakdown on the history of its spread....
I mean you could make that same argument about any new adjuvant or vaccine manufacturing type. Which is interesting, but I don’t see it as any newer of a risk than other new non mRNA vaccines. Where’s the risk from - the LNP constituents? Modified RNA nucleotides? Other stuff in there?
I *think* it was being uncertain about how the nucleotides would interact with the immune system.
As I recall, Weinstein thought it was a good bet for his and Heather's parents to be vaccinated (I don't know which vaccine), but he and Heather(?) were trusting to ivermectin.
Which is one of the reasons the FDA, depending on who you listen to, is either (a) dragging its feet or (b) being necessarily cautious before it grants full approval for any of the vaccines. My understanding is that vaccine approval is normally a three-year process. But this is the first time that we've faced a pandemic since the FDA established this process. So we'll see what happens.
The Johari Window was applied to risk analysis specifically to deal with the known unknowns. In the 2-by-2 matrix of known and unknown in a formal risk assessment, the outcomes of past events are frequently used to create an estimated probability for known unknowns to happen (all very Bayesian). The unknown unknowns are generally not allowed to affect the risk assessment because they're just unknowable until they happen. It sounds like Weinstein is just fretting about the unknown unknowns...
Apparently ADE is something that happens across strains. If you catch Dengue virus, for example, you're immunized against the strain you caught, but another strain may hit you harder than it otherwise would have. It's also not well understood, but it's known to happen in feline infectious peritonitis virus (FIPV), a coronavirus that infects cats. From a year-old Nature article:
"Second, because ADE of disease cannot be reliably predicted after either vaccination or treatment with antibodies—regardless of what virus is the causative agent—it will be essential to depend on careful analysis of safety in humans as immune interventions for COVID-19 move forward."
It seems obvious that there's not any ADE now, but I suppose that in the future a variant could emerge that hits the vaccinated harder than the unvaccinated.
I'm not sure I agree that this is a reason to slow vaccination, though. The best way to prevent a new strain from emerging is to vaccinate as many people and as quickly as possible.
Follow up... I never heard of ADE until recently when I heard this as an argument from an anti-vaxxer, so I didn't bother to follow up on it. Since you've brought it up, though, I'll now classify it as one of the known unknowns about vaccinations in my own personal Johari risk matrix. I did a read-thru the article that I think you referenced, and if I understood the process correctly ADE happens in a couple of scenarios where antibodies with suboptimal sterilizing abilities preferentially bind to the virus, and then the virus evolves around the antibodies and makes a successful attack on the host cells.
Well it's been 22 months since the nCoV19 variant appeared in China, and almost a year since that article was published, and in the meantime over 1 billion doses of various types of vaccines have been administered worldwide. If an ADE scenario were going to happen, the selective pressure of vaccines would have almost certainly made it happen by now. So the current evidence doesn't support Wheatley et al's argument.
Regarding #4 - the vaccines do not seem to eradicate the virus. Significant numbers of people who have been vaccinated do get infected, though the severity is lessened. If our goal is the eradicate the virus, the the vaccines do not appear to be sufficient to do so. Given that, it does make more sense to view children (or any sub population that is very unlikely to be significantly harmed by the virus) individually, to review pros and cons.
That the vaccines aren't 100% effective against infection doesn't imply that they can't eradicate the virus. Even without being 100% effective, vaccinating most people could reduce the transmission rate below 1, which could gradually lead to the extinction of the virus.
The main barriers to eradication are that it's probably unrealistic to vaccinate a sufficient percentage of the population throughout the world, and possible animal reservoirs.
But even if eradication is unfeasible, it's plausible that vaccinating children is useful for minimizing outbreaks.
1) Yeah, but when I watched a 3-hour video with Bret, twice, he seemed to think the way to do this was via prophylactic ivermectin and other sources indicate that the evidence for a prophylactic effect is weak.
2) So, I put up a LW thread about the 3-hour video and eventually noticed, weeks later, that the biggest (but still hand-wavy) piece of evidence they offered for the danger of spike proteins, ovaries concentration, is somewhere between "highly misleading" and "pants-on-fire lie" depending on how it is phrased: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/7NoRcK6j2cfxjwFcr/covid-vaccine-safety-how-correct-are-these-allegations
I was skeptical of the "vaccines killed tens of thousands of Americans!" claim from the beginning. Not only have I seen no evidence against my intuition about the source of the VAERS deaths, but also Steve Kirsch's claim that Covid vaccines "likely killed over 25,800 Americans" was retracted as incorrect by Austin G. Walters (who AFAIK was the one who originally made the claim).
3) In the same video, Dr. Malone says to Bret that "all of the prior attempts to develop human coronavirus vaccines have failed due to ADE.... The [interesting thing] about the current ones is they are showing so much efficacy ... I was watching for an ADE signal, I'm not seeing it".
4) I agree that herd immunity should be the goal and I am concerned that putting vaccinated people together with unvaccinated Covid carriers would help promote vaccine-resistant Covid mutations, if any should arise. (Alberta is doing this: they are lifting the requirement for people with Covid to quarantine, and no longer recommending people get tested for Covid. Has the Conservative government been watching too much Bret Weinstein?)
There’s a lot of discussion on non hidden open threads, just not necessarily on the comments you want. Plenty have very deep (comment tree depth) discussions.
Well you could always subscribe and find out (entice, entice).
I think they're pretty much the same as the open threads, but it's hard for me to be ruthlessly coolly objective since I like fairly much all the content available on this joint.
Boy, I could afford it I guess but 10 bucks a month to NPR to PBS to NYT to Washington Post to the local newspaper to Amazon music streaming etc. Then start adding 10 bucks for Scott’s blog, Freddie’s blog… Let’s just say I’m considering my options at this point.
I cohost the Affix podcast (https://www.affix.live/), a two-dudes talking style podcast focusing on articles/books commonly discussed in this community. Probably the most similar podcast I can think of is Very Bad Wizards, but we're much less academic. I don't really want any monetary support, but would really appreciate getting some constructive feedback on what we're doing.
Accents aside, I've listened to a handful of episodes while cleaning and watering my plants. It kind of feels like hanging out with you guys, which has been a pleasure. If I had to give constructive criticism, it can be a bit too tame. You both come across as very even-keeled which is good for rationalism, but can be a bit one note. So, perhaps there may be some welcome drama in pushing yourselves out of your comfort zones.
How? I'm not sure. If it was up to me, I'd suggest a "First Principles" segment, where you approach an idea with a blank canvas. No priors. Just an exercise in fresh thinking. Almost like a game of taboo, where you're not allowed to lean on precedents.
For example: "imagine a new system for learning". Disallowed terms: classrooms, students, curriculum, teachers, homeschooling...
I wanted to jump on to that thread in the last comments free-for-all about PTSD. I won’t go on and on about it but it intrigued me, and the first thought I had was (just sort of trying) to imagine what was culturally “normative” in those times. If anyone’s interested in pursuing it I would love to talk about it more.
I would attend an outdoor gathering (even though it may well be cold where I live by September). I am not sure whether I would attend an indoor gathering.
I’ve been meaning to get the Philadelphia meetup running again, starting with rebranding our Google Group as ACX Meetup. We had been meeting at my home under our spacious covered porch for much of 2020, but suspended the meetup last December as cases skyrocketed, besides it being too damn cold.
I would have started up again already, but we had a baby in May. Given the shape of things currently, I’d like to continue hosting on my porch. I’ll consult my co-organizer and we’ll pick a date in the next few weeks for the revived meetup.
Baby is great. And if you meant our region, we’ve got a high vaccination rate and still quite a lot of mask compliance, so I feel OK hosting events at my house.
I meant the baby and yourselves, having a new baby is a lot and then a pandemic on top of that is even more of a handful. But if you're all thriving, then that's great and good luck to you all!
Non-sequitur, but how do you like Philly? Just went to a deeply Catholic wedding there and was wondering what it would be like to live there as myself/very much not a Catholic and thought this city probs doesn't have a rationalist community but there is a lot of biotech-
My only difficulty from not being a Catholic was the time when for some reason I wanted to know what parish I'm living in, and I had a hard time convincing the person I was asking that it could be a real question.
From google, I don't know where they got the numbers.
So I just learned in the past week or so that there's something called the 'non-accelerating inflation rate of unemployment' or NAIRU, and I was a little blown away and horrified. As far as I can tell, this is an implicit promise that central banks will increase the cost of capital in order to deliberately make people unemployed. Isn't this really bad? If this is somehow necessary for the economy to function, how can societies justify making unemployment such a terrible experience?
Unemployment, on an individual level, isn't bad, unless you are either (a) don't plan ahead and hence don't have any savings or (b) are unemployed for a long time.
Spending a month or two unemployed between jobs, or just after entering the workforce, is normal and natural.
Almost everybody makes enough money to have savings, roughly in proportion to their normal living expenses. Conversely, spending more money than you earn is a thing rich people do almost as often as poor people. The difference isn't that one group can save and the other cannot; the difference is that the rich have *credit*, which can save their sorry asses if they don't save.
All well and good for someone who has a good enough job to save but I know that there's plenty of people living week to week that will also lose their jobs. This is bad.
That whole “don’t plan ahead” thing doesn’t mean anything when you don’t earn enough to save. In the US where lots of educated people are usually throwing all their surplus income at loan payments, that’s especially true. Also it can take more than two months to find a job even in a good field.
Yes, but we let people make that decision when they're much too young to be reasonable expected to make good long-term decisions.
OTOH, I don't think that's the central case of paycheck to paycheck households. No such households I know of personally are college-degreed households employed in white-collar work. Rather, it's high school and not-quite-high school households in blue-collar work. Your circles may vary.
"OTOH, I don't think that's the central case of paycheck to paycheck households."
Majuscule specifically cited " lots of educated people [...] usually throwing all their surplus income at loan payments", which is straightforwardly living above your means. Assuming the loans in question are mortgages, they overestimated how big/nice a home they could afford; supposing them instead to be pure consumption loans puts the behavior firmly in STAHP WAT R U DOIN territory.
Looking at the Wikipedia article, it looks like this model (or the earlier "natural rate of unemployment" concept) assumes unemployment coming from two causes: frictional unemployment (resulting from the relatively illiquid nature of the labor market, this is more-or-less unavoidable), and that real wages in some sectors are above the market-clearing wage because of the minimum wage, labor unions or similar factors. For the latter kind of unemployment, we should blame minimum wage laws, collective bargaining mandates etc. Inflation can increase employment because it can reduce real wages without people noticing and complaining about it as hard as they would complain about a nominal wage cut, and thus make wages closer to (or perhaps below) the market clearing wage. The model posits that, without increasing inflation, there is a natural rate of unemployment, depending on various market conditions such as labor laws. (In countries with flexible labor markets, such as the US or Germany, the natural rate of unemployment may be rather low. It's much more of a problem in countries like France, Italy or Spain.)
This concept doesn't inherently imply anything the central banks do or promise. (Based on the Wikipedia description.) However, central banks want to avoid excessive inflation, and under this model that has a side effect of having a certain level of unemployment.
I don't know how it works in other countries, but In New Zealand the reserve bank's mandate is to keep inflation between 1-3%, so they do increase interest rates and create unemployment (they don't hide anything about this, it's in their reports, I just wasn't aware of it until now). This all came to my attention when the employers and manufacturer's association ran a news article about how they thought unemployment was too low, and that we needed more unemployed people
Yes, central banks generally have such mandates or guidelines. As far as I can tell, increasing unemployment is a side-effect (the goal is limiting inflation). And it's an effect of the central bank's mandate, not of NAIRU, which is, as far as I can tell, a descriptive principle, not a normative mandate or promise. But again, this is just what I gather based on looking at the Wikipedia article.
I found this baffling because I thought that companies competing for workers by offering better pay and conditions was like, you know, the way it was supposed to work. Not a thing that independent central banks should try and prevent...
But you're assuming that the companies completing for workers are useful companies, meaning they produce something of genuine value to consumers. That is not always true. Sometimes companies are founded with stupid ideas, and they do not actually produce something that is worth (to consumers) the cost of its production. That company needs to go out of business, so the capital and labor it absorbs can be put to better use. One of the ways central banks signal to companies like this that they need to die is to raise interest rates, so that they cannot borrow money to stay alive (or get born in the first place). Basically by raising the price of capital you make people more careful about what kinds of crazy ideas they take to market, which means dumb ideas die faster.
It's all tied up with this idea that raising and lowering interest rates encourages and discourages business formation and risk-taking, the idea being that low rates encourage business formation and risk-taking, and high rates discourage it. In principle, the idea is that you raise rates when the economy is booming, so you discourage people from taking more risk than the booming economy already encourages them to take -- that is, you discourage foolhardiness when everyone's already wildly optimistic -- and you lower rates when the economy is in the pits, so you encourage people to take more risks when the crappy economy has made everyone far too pessimistic and careful.
I'm sure I'm not explaining this carefully enough, but that's my impression of how people think about it these days.
There are multiple factors here, but to keep it short and simple: if the central bank is not following the natural rate of interest in the economy, worse things can happen that will leave even more people unemployed. You're not trading off more vs less people unemployed right now, you're trading off who is unemployed in the medium-term.
Additionally, if capital is too cheap (interest rates are too low), projects that are otherwise stupid and wasteful can be undertaken, and employing people in things that are sub optimal or simply excessively risky which can have very damaging outcomes when they unwind. As with all things in economics, it comes down to opportunity costs.
Can you elaborate on the worse things? It seems to me that employing someone on a sub-optimal project is better than condemning them to be unemployed, particularly when employment and income are as tightly coupled as they are.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stagflation is the first answer that comes to mind, but people have also tied the GFC to excessively low interest rates incentivising excessive risk taking in financial markets.
If I understand that article correctly, in the case of wage-spiral inflation central banks increase interest rates, companies don't expand as fast, demand for labour goes down, people become unemployed and inflation reduces. In the case of stagflation, banks increase interest rates, companies don't expand as fast, demand for labour goes down but inflation keeps going because it wasn't competition for workers that was driving inflation. People still become unemployed. I think what I was arguing was that I didn't like banks increasing interest rates in either case. How would keeping interest rates low in the case of a supply shock exacerbate stagflation?
The stagflation argument is that interest rates in the 1960's were below the natural rate (or alternatively that growth in the monetary base was above the level supportive of the natural rate), which began inflation. After a certain point, that inflation came to be "expected" by all participants in the economy (inflation being a combination of real supply/demand factors and expectations: https://johnhcochrane.blogspot.com/2021/06/the-end-of-end-of-inflation.html), which made central bank action ineffective at correcting it and avoiding the damaging impacts of inflation on economic performance/employment.
The argument for inflation targeting actually began in NZ, where inflation in the 80s was persistently above 8%, increasing uncertainty in decision making. By taking a firm "anti inflation" stance and actually following through with interest rate rises even in the face of increased unemployment, the central bank signals to market participants that it is credible and this critical to managing the "expectations" part of the equation. As to how interest rates impact inflation, that is a multi dimensional and contested question that I'm not super keen on diving into my memories of university macroeconomics, sorry. Hope this is helping.
NAIRU is related to the idea that there is a tradeoff between inflation (nominal variable) and unemployment (real variable); the relationship was reified in the Phillips curve model. When central banks attempted to exploit the relationship it turned out to be contingent & unstable (cf. Lucas critique).
Deliberately making people unemployed slightly longer whenever they are unemployed, in order to prevent people from having to pay more for basic goods and services, seems like the kind of trade-off one needs to make in social policy.
Making unemployment a terrible experience doesn't seem justified though, even if unemployment were entirely self-chosen.
Is that the trade off though? Inflation doesn't mean people pay more for basic goods and services if wages are also inflating, which seems to be the thing the NAIRU model is concerned with. It seems like the trade off is people being unemployed longer vs... something to do with international exchange rates maybe? Or encouraging enterprises of low expected return on investment to go ahead?
And thank you for being the first one to respond to the second half of my question. I'd welcome more peoples' views on whether this seems justified.
Wages never rise as fast as prices in a true inflationary environment. That's why it's bad, that's why people were willing to endure savage pain in the early 80s to get rid of it. If wages rise as fast (or faster!) than prices, that's not "inflation" that's just ordinary economic growth.
Well, in the sense of having lived through it in the 70s, sure, but if you mean by an econometric report, I'd have to go look for it. But you can be pretty generally confident that if wages normally rose faster than prices (or even at the same rate) during "inflation" nobody would care about it.
Right, I have to be careful with that. This isn't about wage-earners, but about institutions that get income from fixed interest rates and the like. I think the problem is *accelerating* inflation. With a high *fixed* inflation rate, you just set interest rates for loans high. But with *accelerating* inflation, you have to do something different for pricing bonds and savings and the like.
We have to look at the causes of the kind of unemployment that inflation affects. As far as I understand, what inflation does is essentially dupe workers into being willing to work for the market-clearing wage (instead of an above-market-clearing wage that minimum wage laws, collective bargaining etc. would sometimes enforce). Wage raises or cuts are more obvious than price increases, so companies can reduce real wages to the market-clearing level without causing too much upheaval.
The reasonable thing to do is to be willing to work for the market-clearing wage regardless of the level of inflation. Then you can have both low unemployment and low inflation. (The level of unemployment with a given inflation isn't set in stone: it depends on labor regulations and the workers' behavior.) This is what places with a low (or no) minimum wage, at-will employment and low unionization do, such as many US states.
If it's politically unfeasible to repeal or reduce the minimum wage, collective bargaining mandates, and limits on lay-offs* and wage cuts, then IMO a moderately high level of inflation (say, 4% instead of 2%) may be beneficial. In particular, it allows declining industries to reduce real wages without cutting nominal wages (which would be extremely unpopular and possibly illegal).
The NAIRU model posits that people take a constant level of inflation into account when judging their wages, and thus a high fixed inflation is insufficient to get them to accept market-clearing wages. To reduce unemployment, inflation needs to be not just high but accelerating. If so, that's definitely not worth it: accelerating inflation would sooner or later cause serious problems. However, I'm skeptical of this model: I'm pretty sure, for instance, that not getting a raise while the inflation is 4% would cause much less resistance than a 4% wage cut while there is no inflation.
* Why does repealing limitation on lay-offs *reduce* unemployment on the long run? Because if companies can't easily fire you, then they will only hire you if they are sure they'll need you for the foreseeable future. In particular, if the economy or a particular sector is in decline, with market-clearing wages decreasing, then if they hired you today for a market-clearing wage, in a few years they'd be forced to pay you an above-market-clearing wage if price inflation is lower than the rate of decline. That's how countries like France, Italy and Spain have ~10% unemployment even at the best of times. In contrast, if companies can fire you on a whim, they can afford to hire you on a whim, so you can quickly find at least a temporary job if you're laid off.
Whether it's bad or not depends on whether you fear unemployment or inflation more. I would guess the NAIRU is probably pretty low, like in the 3-5% range, and so the question is whether it is harsher to have that percentage of people unemployed (generally for short periods of time) or whether it is harsher to have prices rising so that *everybody* is experiencing a real wage cut every year.
Beyond that I think most economists think a rate of near zero unemployment is not a good thing, because it indicates too low a level of "creative destruction," meaning companies that *need* to go out of business, because their business models are stupid, their products don't work, they have terrible management, they are a waste of capital and effort, et cetera, aren't. They're sticking around as "zombies" and sucking up capital and labor that could and should go into more productive uses. That indicates a fossilized and inflexible economy that will have poor growth and be unusually vulnerable to changes in the international environment.
So to have a healthy economy, the argument goes, you need a certain amount of natural selection among companies, meaning some of them need to get culled every year as useless or stupid, and when that happens, people lose jobs.
Isn't an environment with near zero unemployment an environment of creative destruction though? Surely at that level, companies that can't afford to pay their staff an attractive compensation package will lose them to companies that can, and will fold for that reason. That's a ratchet of bad companies closing and freeing up resources for better ones too.
Well, yes, but people don't find new jobs instantaneously. If you have 100 million employed and 10 million of them lose their jobs each year because of creative destruction, and they all find new ones within an average of 6 months, then at any given time you have 5% of your working population unemployed.
The only way to cut unemployment to near zero is to have *such* a high demand for jobs that people get new jobs almost regardless of whether they are well-matched to them, a hiring frenzy. Those things can happen for rational reasons e.g. during the spool-up for a war, but in general it would probably signal an unhealthy level of risk-taking.
The other way to do it is to have it all planned, meaning a central planner decides which industrial efforts to shut down and when and where to send the workers, because then everything is decided in advance, and there's no need for a gap in employment. To some extent what the phenomenon of unemployment means is that we have decided to forgo central planning of employment and instead let each person figure out where he should be working on his own. But of course that takes time and effort, and as a matter of practice, almost nobody does any of it *until* he loses his job, which gives a lag time before the job placement effort bears fruit -- and that's our unemployment regime.
Yup. It's great to be among the first in a rapidly growing new employment field. Guys with whom I went to college in the late 70s/early 80s who got interested in networked computing retired in their 40s and bought 4,000 square foot houses in Park City. Oh well.
I have a fantasy of an economy where it's like that for everyone, where frustrated would-be employers have to do extensive interviewing to get employees.
I don't know how it would work. UBI? Support systems which are so good that people are generally better off with their own businesses?
A sensible, consistent and principled vaccine-hesitancy stand might be "I refuse to take any medical product that hasn't been fully approved by the FDA". Any other year I'd be saying that this is a pretty sensible heuristic to decide what's worth taking.
On the other hand there are some people who are vaccine-hesitant who will nonetheless take a random pink pill that they found on the ground behind the toilets at a music festival. For those people, vaccine hesitancy would be an isolated demand for rigour.
The rate of vaccine hesitancy seems to be fairly consistent worldwide. Is there a cross-cultural way to measure a demand for rigor that filters out other prejudices. And rigor is built into Phase III trials. How about an isolated demand for the pablum of 100 percent certainty that no scientific study will ever provide?
Last I checked there are some significant differences in vaccine hesitancy in different countries. Canada, UK, and Spain are all low, US, France and Poland are all high. I think Japan is high.
Yup, it's only in the past few months that supply has been available enough for hesitancy to cash out as action rather than expressed preferences. The emerging plateaus in vaccination rates are where differences become meaningful rather than more culturally-relative rhetorical metrics.
"Is vaccine hesitancy an isolated demand for rigor?"
Yes. But that doesn't tell us how to fix the problem effectively.
And fixing human reasoning in general is a great goal, but doing it in order to eliminate vaccine hesitancy is like using time travel to pick up a piece of paper left on the floor to prevent yourself from tripping one time 3 weeks ago. Sure, it's net positive, but c'mon!
I haven't taken the vaccine, but I would take it if I had to. I don't think my situation is an isolated demand for rigor, because "Don't take medicine unless you have to" is my perspective on all drugs. I don't like Advil, or flu medicine... I wouldn't take and pain killers when I had my wisdom teeth removed. I'll drink Alcohol (occasionally) or caffeine (constantly)
I would take the vaccine if I needed it to do something I wanted, or if I thought my mortality risk was higher than 1%.
I think the 'now or never' point for a vaccine would be around a week before you catch the disease. Although since that is an ill-defined time (since it may be 'never'), there isn't a clear decision point in the same way there is for dentistry.
I think all preventative medicine would suffer from this same problem. So presumably no vaccine, no baby aspirin to reduce heart attack risk, maybe only un-flouridated water? I'm guessing that cancer screenings and other tests are OK on the other hand, since they aren't drugs.
Vaccine hesitancy of the form "we don't know the long term effects yet", given by someone who goes to crowded public indoor spaces without a mask, is definitely an isolated demand for rigor, since we also don't know the long term effects of the virus. But if a person is avoiding both the vaccine *and* the virus, then it's not clear that it is.
For me, that wouldn't convince me it is or isn't. The world has a lot more than just the two items 'vaccine' and 'virus'. For it not to be isolated, you would need to be applying the same level of rigor to all other aspects of risk assessment in your life, not just those that are covid related.
Sure. But this seems to be asking for a level of consistency that is impossible for real humans. When calling something an "isolated demand for rigor", it's helpful to show something closely related that the person is treating very differently, to help them think about which level of rigor is appropriate for the related context, rather than trying to make them rethink their approach to rigor for everything in their entire life all at once.
Right, nobody can be perfectly consistent... so your point is true if the goal is finger pointing and pointing or name calling. But I think it is ok to take a larger view if the goal is to say 'why in this instance am I being inconsistent with my demand for rigor'?
I’d say “no.” I think many vaccine hesitent people fall into one of three categories, and the following categories can’t really be described as an isolated demand for rigor:
1) something specific scares them about this vaccine (for example, for my Uncle he got a scary disease a couple years ago, and then it looked like the vaccine could cause a relapse so that freaked him out enough he avoided it for a while even after that was disproven).
2) They don’t do basically any vaccine, so COVID vaccines are a continuation of this policy
3) they already got COVID and are dubious that the added protection of the vax is worth the added risk when they already have some antibodies.
I'm not. It's not well-written. It skims over a number of cases without really diving into any one and exploring the reason it exists in the first place, what went wrong, and what might be a better way to proceed. It's a rather generic and not especially new complaint, so I would guess the APS's reason for not publishing it had more to do with "it's not a new thought and not very well written anyway" as compared to "Good God this will reveal the sordid underbelly of HEP that we must at all costs keep secret."
Of course. Silly me. We've made such wonderful advances in Physics over the past 50 years! String Theory has provided a testable proofs of the Theory of Everything. And the discovery of the multiverse has explained away all those pesky anomalies in quantum theory. And, yes, we should spend tens of billions of dollars on the next generation of super-colliders to possibly find some higher-energy particles. <#snarkasm>
I don't think there's anything wrong pointing out that the Physics community has wasted a lot of time on questions that have been scientific dead-ends — and suggesting that they focus their energies on topics that might yield less-grand shorter-term results.
Well, first of all, recall I didn't say Hossenfelder was wrong, I merely said she was unoriginal and tedious, which is kind of a trademark of hers from what I've seen. I realize she's trying to make a new career as a science commenter, but if I were her I'd look into finance or something, I don't think she has what it takes to communicate well and interestingly, and this essay is no exception.
Also, your second point about wasting time, while entirely tangential to my comment, is mistaken enough it begs for corrrection. The very nature of empirical science is that it "wastes" an enormous amount of time chasing down blind alleys. By definition good empiricists do not forswear the investigation of things that seem stupid for theoretical or "common sense" reasons. That's the difference between empiricism and scholasticism, and therefore between the *real* dead end of Dark Ages alchemy and the success of post-Enlightenment science. In the modern view, we regard the proof that such-and-such is a blind alley to be a valuable contribution to science, and we more or less proceed by randomly mapping blind alleys until we stumble across one that is not blind. (The conventional wisdom taught in grade schools and pop science media that science works by some kind of mystical intuition into what is probably correct, then backing that up with successful experiment as some kind of cherry-on-top proof, is so brain dead backwards it ought to make any practicing scientist who comes across it speechless with rage.)
Nor do I think anyone, or any class of people, should have any business telling the individual scientist where he should work: history gives us altogether too many examples of marvelous and unexpected discoveries attendant on some worker's weird idiosyncratic decisions of what interests him or her. In this case, the wisdom of the crowds is not wise at all.
On the other hand, if you want to argue that the public has a clear right to re-orient the funding of science research around things that are most likely a lot more testable than strings, that's just fine, and in fact I would entirely agree with you. However, other people have made this argument, and made it much better than Hossenfelder, and that was my point. I'm disappointed in Hossenfelder resorting to the tediously common appeal to paranoia argument as an explanation for why her essay was rejected, rather than the more self-aware and cooly rational hypothesis that her writing isn't good enough. That way lies the potential for improvement and a better chance next time.
Can you provide some links to other people who have made similar arguments ot Hossenfelder? In the meantime, let me digest what you said, and I'll respond to your points anon.
My favorite is Lee Smolin's book "The Trouble With Physics," which I admire for the detail into which he goes, the examples he provides, the sympathy he generally gives for how we got here in the first place -- he assumes people had good intentions and pretty sound instincts, and what happened is a combination of natural human behavior and some chunk of bad luck -- what the genuine challenges are, and a few thoughts about how to do better. I'm not saying I necessarily agree with everything he said, or says, or even most of it, but I think he makes similar points much more usefully and provides solid food for thought.
I've been running an online discussion group on Parfit's Reasons and Persons. We're wrapping up Part One next week (fourth meeting). This isn't so far into the book that it would be difficult for anyone to ramp up and join us.
Worth a read - this paper by a team working with Gelman at Columbia is super-interesting and explains something you have talked about a bit in terms of multiple causes and limited possible room for explanation, but it explains this far more clearly than anything I have seen before.
Abstract: In some scientific fields, it is common to have certain variables of interest that are of particular importance and for which there are many studies indicating a relationship with a different explanatory variable. In such cases, particularly those where no relationships are known among explanatory variables, it is worth asking under what conditions it is possible for all such claimed effects to exist simultaneously. This paper addresses this question by reviewing some theorems from multivariate analysis that show, unless the explanatory variables also have sizable effects on each other, it is impossible to have many such large effects. We also discuss implications for the replication crisis in social science.
Is there a replication crisis in social science or are the standards of replication crises (where there is one is in hot debate in neuro and cell bio rn) in harder fields being universally applied everywhere? The findings of social studies are never going to be in line with dogmatic deductive scientific methods.
Also, while it's not impossible, I'd be pretty surprised if the Hungarian government instituted new lock downs based on Delta, hospitalizations would need to get far worse than they have in Britain.
I'm not very active here, but I would be interested in going to a meetup in Malta in ~September, and I wouldn't consider holding one indoors irresponsible, though I think meeting outdoors would be more pleasant. Not sure if there are any other readers from Malta tho?
Sorry, not from Malta - I am from Germany, which is why I feel the urge to point out that your user name is lacking an 's'. It should be "Wasserschweinchen". (Cute avatar, by the way.)
I'm organizing the ACX / LessWrong meetings in Portland, Oregon for the past couple months and we are comfortable meeting in person with an online option.
It would appear we still don't have much of our pre-pandemic attendence and I would very much appreciate any publicity or visits you could offer. We meet bi-weekly at the beeminders house, and have attendence around 10 people. I'd be happy to communicate more about it over email at scelarek@gmail.com.
I want to recommend "The Hidden Spring" by Mark Solms. It talks at length about predictive coding, etc, and also purportedly gives an account for how and why consciousness arose.
I experience debilitating shame for situations that my subconscious deems "mistakes". It can scale from the event haunting me for a couple of hours, to days, to weeks, and the worst cases I'll remember as painful flashbacks forever. If I make a mistake that gets deemed as particularly bad, my brain will use most of its processing power to go over the situation again and again, making it impossible to focus on anything. I've walked through red light into a street in this state only realizing it after a car horn. This is similar to when you hear about a problem someone is having and your brain immediately goes into problem solving mode, except there is no solution to past mistakes so you get stuck in a loop. I've kind of learned to live with this, but it seems to be a root cause for many traits and behaviors.
The problem I'm having though is that I have difficult time defining what this is, finding any information on it or finding people who have this issue. There's avoidant personality, but that places emphasis on relationships and otherwise doesn't feel like a fit. There is generally just discussion on shame, but it often places emphasis on feelings of inadequacy. My emphasis is more on the aftermath, the debilitating effect of it, the flashbacks that feel like someone stabbing me out of the blue. It doesn't matter if I rationally know I made no mistake, I still can't shake the reaction my body has to it.
Does this sound familiar to anyone? Any resources you can point out for me to further research this on my own?
I think many people do experience this, I myself have episodes going back to my childhood popping up into the conscious from memory again for no reason that I can discern (there isn't any particular trigger).
It seems like the subconscious just likes to spring "Hey, remember that devastatingly humiliating time when you made a total fool of yourself/screwed up really badly? Let's relive that all over again in excruciating detail while I tell you what a worthless sack of shit you are!" at times. I have no idea what it's called or what can be done to sort it out - I imagine the recommendation for therapy would be CBT but that's as far as I can go.
Embarrassing experiences from your past coming up is just a normal part of the human experience for everyone, or at least everyone I both know and have met on the internet.
John, this is very familiar. I also have flashbacks to painfully embarrassing moments in my past, often to the point where I say aloud "No, don't" or something similar. Thinking about it now, I'd say the most powerful reactions are to incidents from adolescence or early adulthood.
I was in CBT for a while and the best advice I got was to forgive myself for the incident and move on. That seems to help a bit, but it's certainly not a cure.
Familiar to me too, including the occasional involuntary vocalizations.
I've more or less convinced my brain that there is a "statute of limitations" of 5 years on these things, so that I don't need to feel bad about incidents older than that, because I've changed enough as a person since then. That doesn't fix the more recent ones, but maybe I can gradually shorten the timespan.
This sounds related to the extreme scrupulosity often averred by readers of this and the previous blog. You can't tolerate ever making a mistake ever and are haunted by it, whereas a normal person just doesn't *care* that much about it compared to, say, the nicest pair of tits currently visible on this particular street. That thing where prominent utilitarians get paroxysms from merely thinking about the concept of suffering also seems related; both are instances of some sort of highly-unrealistic neurotic perfectionism, badly adapted to (seemingly even disgusted by, at times) life in the actual cosmos.
What sort of mistakes? Also I’m not sure of the use of subconscious here - at least in, like, “lizard brain” cases you can claim a distinction between rational and emotional brain or whatever, not that it’s meaningful, but this is a “rationality error” so I don’t think that’s really any more sub of conscious than anything.
It’s probably (classified as) a form of OCD, guilt/shame/intrusive thought/scrupulously is my guess. Not a fan of that classification and associated approaches to treatment myself though!
Thoughts tend to think themselves. And for a lot of people the negative thoughts have a lot more emotional pull than the positive.
A lot of personal experience this including me. It seems like it’s having a debilitating effect in your case though.
One possible remedy that you can do on your own is a daily breathing meditation where you let thoughts arise and acknowledge the emotional discomfort of the painful ones. They tend to slip away easier than if you try to repress them. A sort of acknowledge and let go technique.
With a regular practice you will begin to rewire your Default Mode Network, the habituated thought processes that your mind drifts into when not actively engaged.
There are a lot of apps that can get you started with a meditation practice. I used the Calm App and after I while my DMN did begin to change.
I’ve gotten to a point where I only use the app’s timer now. It plays a gentle gong every 15 minutes.
If this doesn’t suit your style, CBT may be the way to go. I’m pretty sure with some self work you should be able to improve the way your mind treats you.
The Default Mode Network has a technical definition that I’ll let the link below describe.
The things that are processed in it are day dreaming, random ruminations when you aren’t using your mind to do some task or solve some problem.
People tend to habitually fall into the same sorts of ruminations by default. If they cause no distress, no problem. If they tend negative, thinking of past failures or worrying about possible future problems, a person can probably improve this collection of seemingly random thoughts.
The DMN is gone over in some detail in the Michael Pollan book “How to Change Your Mind” or word to that effect.
Nothing to be horrified about. If you change the DMN for the better you just spend less time dwelling on past mistakes or possible future problems and pay attention to and enjoy what’s right in front of you now.
I certainly have this to a degree, though it’s less problamatic.
I think the best advice for where to find stuff about it, if this is as big a problem as it sounds like, is to seek professional help from a psychiatrist or psychologist rather than internet strangers. They’d be able to talk with you to get more precise information and suggest more precise treatments/diagnoses.
But, if you, like me, have an irrational aversion towards going to psychs, the way I handle it is to learn a method that overrides the thoughts. My go to used to be League of Legends (I’m not joking), since I found the mixture of physical activity/high concentration/rage at my teammates usually distracted me long enough I could pull out of a really deep rut. For smaller ruts, I’d just pick a topic to think about it and do my best to drag myself back to that topic every time.
Obviously League or just “think about other stuff really hard” might not work as well for you, but I’d say that you should note down the things that you do that seem to be at the end of these ruts, and then see if you can adapt them into a useful breakout behavior.
But I’m not a professional, so disclaimer blah blah blah.
I'm not a doctor, but that sounds a lot like generalized anxiety disorder, so you may want to follow up with a mental health professional. Feeling bad about mistakes is normal, but if those feelings are always blowing up and never go away, that's not normal.
Sounds familiar to me, except mine's about humiliation.
I model this as something like PTSD - my brain got a threat model it deems dangerous, and tries to make sure I find corresponding situations painful enough to avoid them like death. (or someting like that)
Solution that (slowly) works for me is bit by bit building a model / comprehension of reality that "allows" this type of situation, an understanding that explicitly includes how mundane it really is.
Should add that it might be useful to first explore *why* that type of situation "is" dangerous.
You may consciously know it isn't, but honestly, sometimes it feels like my conscious beliefs are just tribal rhetoric I internalized. Like my true beliefs are closer to how I *feel* about things.
So, listen to the feelings, try to let them explain what exactly the danger is. IME the emotional reasoning is often quite sound and deserves careful debate with everything else you know.
What are some possible future trajectories for lock-down-like Covid-19 restrictions? (I'm primarily interested in the US, but the arguments might be generic.) Here are a few I can think of:
1. Permanent mini-lockdown, possibly oscillates up and down. Businesses are legally required to discourage work from the office as much as possible, local public transport requires masks, air travel requires health checks and/or proofs of vaccinations, international travel includes quarantines, etc. This seems difficult to pull off both politically and also in terms of long-term compliance (including "difficult politically because of poor long-term compliance").
2. A requisite portion of the population (70%?) gets vaccinated, and Covid-19 is declared to be over. Seems somewhat implausible (and/or slow) in the US as a whole since vaccinations seem to have stalled at a bit more than 50%, although perhaps if the vaccine is approved in children, we'll cross that threshold. Also, with the Delta variant more contagious (and perhaps more likely to turn vaccinated people into carriers / spreaders) than previously expected, the previously-advertised 70% might get bumped up higher?
3. It is empirically observed that cases and/or deaths have dropped enough to stop imposing restrictions. (i.e. mini-lockdown that actually gradually ends.) Perhaps this is because we achieve herd immunity by natural immunity; with ~10% of the US as cases, and ~50% vaccinated, depending on how many cases were missed due to lack of symptoms, we might actually be close. Because of inertia, I would expect Covid-19 deaths being treated as more important than other deaths for a while, causing this to take longer than e.g. if we had equivalent levels of deaths but had crossed an observable vaccination threshold.
4. We declare Covid to be over now, and just deal with the extra cases. This would be somewhere between declaring that lockdowns were a bad idea to begin with, and declaring that we've achieved #3 (e.g. "yes cases from delta are rising, but they're not rising all that much").
My interest here is partly in planning my own life (e.g. when might international travel be a thing again?) and partly in trying to understand some of the positive externalities vaccinations have on other people (e.g. if we're following scenario #2, then you vaccinating makes my lockdown end faster; this mechanism is absent from scenarios #1, #3, #4).
As I said elsewhere, COVID will never be over; instead, it will become endemic, just like the flu. Realistically, I expect to see "rolling lockdowns" in the foreseeable future. For example, hospitalizations are surging in LA county, so LA county re-instituted mask mandates. I fully expect them to re-issue lockdown orders sometime in the near future. Meanwhile, other counties are going to coast along, until the next Delta/Lambda/Xi/whatever variant causes them to tip over. This process will continue for the foreseeable future (barring Singularity-grade medical advances).
As you said, even 70% vaccination is unlikely, so herd immunity is off the table -- and it won't happen naturally, because the virus mutates too fast for that.
International travel is sort of possible now, but it will never again be as fast or as convenient as it was before COVID. You will have to budget 1..4 weeks of quarantine into every trip, depending on where you're going; and you should be prepared to be locked down upon arrival.
I should've clarified that I don't expect COVID the virus to go away, but one possible future would be that it's legally treated like the flu (i.e. you're encouraged to vaccinate, but there's very limited legal requirements around that, and instead it's largely left to your own decision-making).
I wanted to follow up on your "even 70% vaccination is unlikely, so herd immunity is off the table -- and it won't happen naturally, because the virus mutates too fast for that". I don't think I disagree with you about the conclusions, but you seem to be implying that 70% vaccination (or 80% vaccination, or whatever the updated number is) would be enough for herd immunity, while having that fraction of the population get the disease would not be sufficient. I'm confused by the implied claim that the virus can out-mutate natural immunity but not artificially-induced immunity.
First, is this a claim you meant to make at all, or am I misreading?
Second, if this is actually something you're claiming, can you elaborate on why? Is artificial immunity that much stronger than natural immunity when it comes to variants? Or is it that much easier to get everyone vaccinated in a short period of time (thus eradicating the disease), whereas natural immunity will be more drawn out and there never will be 70% of people who are solidly immune to whatever is making the rounds currently?
Well, the live virus does mutate, and I would assume it could eventually evade vaccine defenses that way. Whereas if almost everybody were to get vaccinated, it probably wouldn't find as many vulnerable hosts as it needs to evolve a successful evasion technique. Plus, artificial immunity should last longer due to adjuvants, and coronaviruses are generally known for the short time immunity lasts (I haven't seen estimates for Covid specifically).
> Realistically, I expect to see "rolling lockdowns" in the foreseeable future.
Everywhere, or in some jurisdictions? The UK went along with lifting nearly all restrictions, except those on international travel, despite near-record cases.
What are US states doing? Have some of them lifted all restrictions? How many?
> International travel is sort of possible now, but it will never again be as fast or as convenient as it was before COVID. You will have to budget 1..4 weeks of quarantine into every trip, depending on where you're going; and you should be prepared to be locked down upon arrival.
Many countries are lifting quarantine requirements for vaccinated travellers (and/or for recently tested ones) at least from some countries, though it depends very much on where you're going from where.
I think the most likely thing is that a whole bunch of vaccine mandates come down. There is a recent surge of these among government and healthcare workers, and if those survive the inevitable legal challenge, I think it not unlikely that will pave the way for big business, and then medium to small business, to likewise impose them as a condition of employment. Nobody likes the huge expense of COVID adaptations, and they like even less the possibility of being sued because the receptionist caught COVID allegedly because the employee bathroom sink wasn't sufficiently sterilized.
So if business can wash its hands of the whole thing by saying "get a vaccine or get another job" they will, and then it's game over for almost all of the vaccine hesitant -- when it's a conflict between principles and $$ in the paycheck, the latter always wins.
The most interesting part of this are the state-by-state differences. I can easily see some legislatures passing laws that say businesses can't be sued for requiring COVID vaccination as a condition of employment, and then it's off to the races, while other legislatures might easily pass laws prohibiting requiring vaccines as a condition for employment, and then I doubt vaccination levels will vary much, unless people start dying in large numbers again.
It's not immediately obvious to me what this says about the future of lockdown-and-mask-and-quarantine-style restrictions: are we expecting those to become declared unnecessary (because, with paychecks in the picture, 70% of people do get vaccinated), or to become observed unnecessary (because enough people will have gotten immunity one way or the other that the hospitalizations and deaths settle down), or to continue basically indefinitely?
I'd be super interested in holding a meetup in Mexico City. As for whether it is irresponsible, although vaccination has been slower than what one would wish for, most people I hang out with here are already vaccinated (most got vaccinated in the US over the past few months). I imagine that people who would'd be interested in an ACX meet up would be drawn from a similar population and hence have higher than average vaccination rates, so I wouldn't be very worried about risk of contagion. Of course, one can always make, vaccination mandatory for the meeting.
I would go to either indoor or outdoor meetup in September. I would be more worried about the state of restrictions here in Poland by then: there are virtually no cases at the moment, so September might still see a new peak in cases and some lockdowns (vaccination-wise, Poland is doing slightly worse than EU overall).
I think a lot of rationalists and rationalist-adjacent types massively overestimate the possible practical value of space colonisation as a way of avoiding extinction.
The future is hard to predict, sure. It could be very good, or very bad. I think a future where humans progress to the point where humans are, someday, capable of establishing functioning colonies on Mars, the Moon, and conceivably other objects in the solar system, while optimistic, is perfectly credible. And a future in which human activity or natural disaster renders the earth uninhabitable beyond anything we can do to prevent it, and humans go extinct is distressingly plausible.
But a future in which both those things happen simultaneously strikes me as much, much less likely. Establishing undersea civilisations, or turning the Sahara or the Antarctic into hospitable paradises, or reversing all the pollution humans have ever caused and much worse besides, or would be tasks with a lot in common with rendering other planets hospitable, but much easier.
If we ever become capable of colonising other planets, we almost certainly won't need to.
I'm a both/and thinker about this. I think it's entirely reasonable to have orbital habitats that support trillions of humans (even normal meat humans like us) in this solar system, and make Earth (or even other planets ) into a paradise.
There are lots of ways the world could end (meaning intelligent life in human form.) Impacts, gamma ray bursts, aliens, who knows. Lots of ways we can't even anticipate right now, I'm sure. But I'm with Elon and others: let's get up there and out of the cradle and extend our chances.
Why assume only humans are capable of making the Earth uninhabitable? We live next to a star, and stars are exceedingly high-energy objects. Nor do we understand them well enough to predict what they'll do over even a mere million years or so. All the Sun has to do is increase or decrease its luminosity by, say, 10% for the next 100,000 years, and we're all screwed. Or a comet could come trundling in from the outer darkness and hit the planet, or a series of them like Shoemaker-Levy hitting Jupiter.
That also means there are ways in which the Earth can be threatened that no amount of geoengineering tech can fix, e.g. the habitable zone around the Sun moves out to the orbit of Jupiter or something. In which case, we'd better know how to engineer Europa or something.
> All the Sun has to do is increase or decrease its luminosity by, say, 10% for the next 100,000 years, and we're all screwed. Or a comet could come trundling in from the outer darkness and hit the planet
The former hasn't happened in the last several hundred million years, and the latter has only happened a few times at most. (I mean, a comet/asteroid that would pose an extinction risk to humans.) This can help estimate the risk of it happening in the next x years.
In particular, I definitely the risk of extinction from non-human causes in the next few hundred years is small enough that it doesn't justify expending significant resources on space colonization today, when technological development will in all likelihood make it much cheaper a few hundred years from now than it is today.
It's seemed to me that getting humans on Mars or the Moon doesn't add much redundancy that prevents against disasters. It's hard to think of a disaster that kills everyone on Earth without killing everyone in the solar system. Getting humans out of the solar system might though.
Sure it is. The K-T impact repeated would have a good chance of wiping out civilization, and wouldn't effect any other planet. An even larger impact, such as the one thought to have created the Moon, would almost certainly wipe out all life on the planet. A close encounter with another star could perturb only the Earth's orbit fatally. And leaving those aside, within the next billion years the Sun will brighten enough to make the Earth uninhabitably hot, while making the outer planets more habitable.
I think the impact that created the Moon would also likely wipe out life on Moon and Mars, not just on Earth. Less obvious about the close encounter with another star. I think you're right that the K-T impact would be a size that would likely be existential for life on Earth but not for life on Mars, and maybe not for the Moon either.
Now that you mention it, I do seem to remember thinking that in Bostrom's list of existential threats, all would likely hit Moon and Mars if they were sufficient to extinguish human life on Earth, except for asteroid. (Pandemic, nuclear war, bad societal equilibrium, gamma ray burst.)
Not sure I understand your original comment, then. Are you saying Mars runs the same risk of impacts as the Earth, or are you saying that the *same* impact would simultaneously wipe out life on Earth or Mars? I *thought* you were saying "a" disaster that wipes out everyone on Earth would probably wipe out everyone on any planet in the Solar System -- which would mean the same impact (given you used the article "a") would have to wipe out life on both planets -- which is obviously silly.
So now I'm confused. Are you just saying that Mars runs the same risk as Earth at catastrophic impacts? I would agree with that, but recall that if humanity is self-sufficient on both planets (a big ask), then the probability that humanity is wiped out is the joint probability of near-simultaneous* impacts on both planets, which is exceedingly unlikely, indeed has probably never happened aside from the initial condensation of the planets.
---------------
* Because if the impacts are widely separated in time (by human standards, e.g. 10,000 years, which is an eyeblink by astronomical standards), whichever planet was *not* hit can repopulate the one that was.
My thought is that if a pandemic, or a nuclear war, or a bad societal equilibrium (lock-in), or a gamma ray burst, destroyed all human life on Earth, the same event would probably destroy all human life on the Moon or Mars.
In my original comment I had thought the same was true for asteroid impacts, but I now accept that a K-T sized impact would likely wipe out life on one planet but not another, though a Theia/Moon sized impact probably would wipe out life on all three if it did so for one.
Well, a gamma-ray burst or other cosmic event, yes, that could indeed sterilize the entire Solar System. But I'm still unclear on why you think even a body the size of the Moon hitting the Earth would have any simultaneous effect on Mars. The two planets are really, really far apart, about 60 million km at closest approach, so it's kind of like if a bullet hits an apple why would that do anything to another apple 300 meters away?
>If we ever become capable of colonizing other planets, we almost certainly won't need to.
"Need", in common usage, means much more than "will become literally extinct without". I agree that space is overrated as a location for Apocalypse Bunkers, and that this is a poor argument for developing and settling places extraterrestrial. But we've discussed that already back on SSC: https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/12/17/acc-should-we-colonize-space-to-mitigate-x-risk/
Meanwhile, an awful lot of us seem to need, in the usual colloquial sense, things that are increasingly difficult to provide from purely terrestrial sources because e.g. NIMBY is a thing and the whole world is someone's back yard. And whatever we *can* get or have from just Earth alone, we're going to want more of.
I initially supported terrestrial apocalypse communities, due to their accessibility in an emergency. But by the end of the piece, I came to the conclusion that the political will to maintain them would have to be consistent over generations. by contrast, a moon bunker is something that you kinda *have* to maintain and can't just quietly defund.
I don't much like the idea of barely self sufficient colonies on the Moon and Mars, because the Moon and Mars are frankly pretty sucky real estate compared to the Earth. Who's going to want to live there, once the novelty is gone?
My idea of space colonisation is to create places that are better than Earth. The movie Elysium (stripping away the dumb class warfare plot) shows what a probable minimum viable better-than-Earth space habitat might look like. Beyond that, if you can make your habitats several thousand km wide (I forget how wide exactly?) then you can spin them to create 1g while replicating a human-friendly day-night cycle.
Anyway, a level of technology which allows us to strip the moon to create such habitats is also probably the level of technology which allows some depressed madman in a lab to raze the entire Earth's biosphere, so perhaps for that reason it's worth being concerned about the long-term survival of Earth.
Has it occurred to anyone that humanity is already waging wars about imaginary lines, and interplanetary differences are gonna add a *lot* of fuel to anti-outgroup sentiments?
If we spread to multiple planets, the planets will have anti-outgroup sentiment directed at one another. But each planet will have less anti-outgroup sentiment internally. Nothing unites like an enemy.
Could anyone give me a more nuanced explanation as to what “ban teaching critical race theory in schools” looks like as a policy? I’ve seen that sort of terminology tossed around in the media for some states’ laws, but it feels like there’s a lot of vagueness there. To me there’s a big difference between “critical race theory can never be mentioned/explained/analyzed in schools” and “students can’t be forced to take a class that teaches them that critical race theory is true.”
I’d just like to note that I will try to avoid getting myself into arguments over whether the policies are good; I’m more interested in whether this is something like the Georgia voting laws that got oversimplified by the media, or if they’re as cut and dry as it is made out to be.
Most of the laws don't mention the phrase "critical race theory". For the Texas bill (https://legiscan.com/TX/text/HB3979/id/2339637) most of the text seems fine, but there are a few shocking things in there.
"no teacher shall be compelled by a policy of any
state agency, school district, campus, open-enrollment charter
school, or school administration to discuss current events or
widely debated and currently controversial issues of public policy
or social affairs;"
"No teacher, administrator, or other employee in
any state agency, school district, campus, open-enrollment charter
school, or school administration shall shall require, or make part
of a course the following concepts: ... (4)
members of one race or sex cannot and should not attempt to treat
others without respect to race or sex;"
"No private funding shall be accepted by state
agencies, school district, campuses, open-enrollment charter
schools, or school administrations for the purposes of curriculum
development, purchase or choice of curricular materials, teacher
training, or professional development pertaining to courses on
Texas, United States, and world history, government, civics, social
I really really enjoy how it went the full circle and now the right officially insist that all races are equal and should be treated as such, and the left insist that they are not and some races deserve special treatment and deference from others.
Wait, are you saying that teachers should lie to students and say that pretending not to see race or gender is the same as actually ignoring it? Because it's pretty clear that most people, if not all people, actually find it impossible to actually be race-blind or gender-blind.
I can see that it's aspirational, but it seems bad to require teachers to ignore reality.
"It can be difficult to X" and "you cannot X" are often used colloquially as synonyms of each other, as when people say "you cannot raise taxes without harming economic development" or "you cannot jump across this six foot gap".
And when something is difficult or impossible to do successfully, it is often the case that trying to do it will result in worse failings than trying something else. There's a meaningful discussion about whether trying to ignore people's race and gender is an effective way to result in more equal treatment of people, but this bill is trying to make it illegal to have that discussion in school, and to mandate that teachers never discuss evidence for the side that says that trying to treat people in a race-blind way often ends up with more unequal racial treatment than race-conscious policies.
The only objection I have to any of it is that I'd prefer a general principle that publicly funded schools shouldn't teach normative judgments, rather than only banning some specific judgments.
The voters's values should guide government policy, not the other way around. When the government attempts to shape the values of (future) voters, it either just leads to conformism (if it teaches the values of the majority), or it's anti-democratic (if it teaches values different from those of the majority); I consider it inappropriate either way. If the government only bans making certain specific political judgments, it may end up just changing the shape of the propaganda pushed at public schools, instead of eliminating it.
I don't know that you would regard it as nuanced in any sense, but to me the policy is very simple: you can't teach anti-scientific drivel in school. It doesn't matter whether it's astrology, intelligent design, gender studies, or critical race theory, it shouldn't be permitted.
Does it count as "anti-scientific drivel" to characterize "critical race theory" or "gender studies" as such? It's true that there is anti-scientific drivel within some of the work that goes by those terms. But to characterize an entire field as such when there is quite a bit of careful scientific work within the field is anti-scientific too.
No, it isn't. There's a bunch of mock-scientific academic work in these fields, sure; but you'll find that there's also a bunch of mock-scientific academic work on ID. Neither exhibits the sligthest probity or verity.
Dunno if that's a great argument, given that there was a great deal of valuable and accurate astrometry amid astrology, and a great deal of valuable and useful characterization of chemical reactions amid alchemy, and for that matter John C. Calhoun made some wise and sensible statements about the nature of a federal government amid his defense of slavery.
That is, a field of work need not be *entirely devoid* of intellectual merit to be condemned. We can come to that conclusion based on its central premises, and personally I would consider any field which has as a central premise that awareness of racial differences is, or ought to be, central to the function of human society to be pretty suspect. The distinction between that and outright racism is too narrow, to me. Such a field would have to clear a very high bar of evidentiary proof that it has general merit for me to consider it acceptable to enshrine as a legitimate field of study.
"You can't teach anti-scientific drivel" sounds like a simple policy, until you discover that different people have very different ideas of what constitutes anti-scientific drivel.
Sure; it's also notably the case that it's easier to get laws against anti-scientific drivel perceived as conservative on the books than prog drivel. Nevertheless, that doesn't mean critical race theory is any less drivel than intelligent design.
I have a room that isn't getting as cool as the rest of the house, causing some suffering for people inside of it, so I'm looking into window AC units.
The room also doesn't heat well in the summer, so I thought, "oh, I'll get one with a heat pump, too."
Well, window AC units are less than $200, and AC-units-with-heat-pumps seem to go for at least $600.
What gives? I thought a heat pump was just an AC unit running in reverse. This is for a relatively southern climate, so I don't need to push against an insane heat gradient. From the looks of it I'll just be better running a space heater 24/7.
I'm no expert, but I think usually an AC works by just having the compressor on the exterior, so it radiates the heat into the outdoors. In order to make that into a heat pump, you have to pump that heated air into the building. I don't know if that means you have to physically structure the compressor in a different way, or have two of them, or something else.
Like you, I would have thought it should be basically the same, but thinking of it in terms of a window unit rather than a central one made it clear to me that *something* more has to be different.
I was thinking "screw you guys, i f you're gonna charge me 3x, I'll buy 2 @ 1x each, and install one in each direction," but trying to air condition the outside might be bad for the coils.
It’s a little more complicated. The window heat pumps are new to me so I can’t tell you why they are more expensive. Being new could be a large part of it.
If you’d like to know how they work it’s probably best to begin at the beginning.
How do I do that Mr Science?
Well Eddy there is a well known principle called the Carnot Cycle.
You need several additional valves, some of which need to work with high-pressure refrigerant, as well as more complicated electronic control widgetry, to reverse the flow of refrigerant and switch from heating to cooling. That's a reason on the supply side. On the demand side, I would guess the demand for window heat pump isn't nearly as big as the demand for window A/C units, so, economies of scale, competition, et cetera.
Wiktionary has that definition, and an older one. Unfortunately they put the Sir Mix-a-Lot quote under the wrong one. https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/simp
Whenever I hear someone complain about the "digital dark age", I wonder if it really is a problem in light of the likelihood that the NSA has been saving all the contents of the internet for years now. Someday, it will be released back to the public.
I've been happy doing indoor social events with presumably vaccinated people the past few weeks. I'm not sure if I still would be happy with this in September. It will depend a lot on whether the recent spikes in the US reverse themselves.
I basically think of capitalism as expressing human desires weighted by purchasing power. If you imagine some kind of "work point" system based on how long you work, how arduous your work is, and how rare the skills are for your work in comparison to the desire for it, it seems to me that when you work for someone else you earn "work points" in the form of money that you can spend to get someone else to do work that *you* want them to do. (Except in a complicated acasual way where people predict your desires instead of responding to them, but in effect it's similar.) Then there's saving, where you sacrifice your work points in the present (freeing people up to do work other people want them to do), somehow in exchange for more work points in the future, that I don't fully understand. Is that a good way of thinking about it?
Oh, also, I don't understand the effect of countries printing currency. It seems like it should be a huge asset, so I don't understand the situation with the euro (it can't be the case that each european country has their own central bank that can print their own euros at their discretion, right?)
Precisely - there's one European Central Bank; which has created interesting intra-Union dynamics; for example one of the reasons the original Grexit was so opposed in the core of the EU was because having the country in the currency was effectively inflationary to the entire Euro - boosting export-driven economies like Germany that would, ceteris paribus, have stronger currencies.
That's the gist, but it falls apart once you have a massive amount of capital (land, real estate) acquired originally by violence, that is needed by everyone. See all the Georgism discussion on ACX.
Re saving, you're essentially lending your work points to someone else who would like to have more, because they can turn them into even more (leverage) and they're sharing their profits by paying interest.
Land isn't a massive amount of capital though; in developed countries it's a tiny fraction of all capital at this point.
That's one of the main reasons I don't support Georgism: expropriating the value of land would do more harm to investor confidence (how can they trust we won't make up some excuse to expropriate other asset classes as well?) than any benefit it could have. That's probably true even in most developing countries: agriculture doesn't constitute most of the economy, except in the poorest countries.
It's not about how long, arduous, or skilled your work is. It's about how effective your work is at satisfying other people's desires, and how many third parties can (and are willing to) do that even more effectively than you. The highly trained entomologist who spends long hard months categorizing the bug population of East Kreplachistan gets paid less than the vacationing entrepreneur who cleverly notices that Kreplachistani native artwork would go over real well back home and spends an afternoon buying it cheap at the local market, because people collectively want the latter more than the former.
Be very wary of the desire to reduce complicated things to simple analogies; often, in simplifying, you lose the very parts of it that end up being important.
That being said, 'saving' (more properly, investing) can be looked at this way:
Society has two competing collective impulses: people want surplus production (because having too much is a lot less of a problem than not having enough) and people want to minimize waste. For example, a society produces crops. If they don't have enough crops, people starve, so they plant enough crops so that most years will have a surplus. Some of the crops get eaten, some get planted for the next crop, and the rest are surplus. If they don't do something with the surplus, it'll spoil eventually. One thing that can be done is to plant some of the surplus to try for a bigger surplus next year (This is self limiting, because land and labor are limited in the same way; they might not have enough surplus land or workers to plant all the surplus crops). Other things you can do with the surplus (such as trade) have the same effect; anything that produces something in return leaves you better off than letting it go to waste.
Surplus 'work points' work under the same logic as other surpluses. You have no idea what conditions will be in the future when you want to spend the work points on something essential. Therefore, if you have an option to increase your stash of work points by paying someone to do work for you that will generate work points over time, this is a better option than letting them sit around. For example, if you have surplus 'work points' and you know someone with a need for something that can be acquired with work points and insufficient points to acquire it, it only makes sense to acquire it for them if they pay you back more than you give them.
The data from the US military might be more reliable than much of the other data. Is there reason to doubt the general conclusion from Scott's article? Or is the US military just a weird outlier?
I'd be happy to host a Greater London ACX meetup - picnic in Hyde Park or somewhere? @Scott can I ask Claire & Buck if they can fund evidence-based brain-boosting drinks & healthy nibbles?
With some cities reinstating mask mandates I’m wondering what the long term plan is here. Do they expect the number of people vaccinated to increase significantly going forward? If not is there any end to this cycle? Are we going to have new variants every few months and never resume regular life? Have any of these public officials explained what the end game is here ?
I’d love to see a post on “what’s the endgame for COVID.”
Either mandate vaccines and create a streamlined process for RNA for variants or just give up on all restrictions now since it’s basically just a delaying tactic. Personally I prefer streamlined approval with no mandate and no restrictions but a mandate would at least be defensible on some level. What we’re doing now doesn’t seem like it is.
If this time we stop at mask mandates, then maybe there's hope of this thing converging after another round or two? I could potentially imagine the politics playing out as "every time there's a new variant, you have to do *something*" (for a while, at least) but with the "something" getting increasingly weaker.
If everyone is vaccinated, I think the chance of someone getting in a car crash on the way to the meetup far exceeds the chance of someone getting seriously ill from covid caught at the meetup.
Let's suppose average meetup attendee has to drive 50 miles. Most of this is over busy bay-area streets, which are probably four times more dangerous than the average mile driven in the US. The chance of any car crash is 1 in 366 per 1000 miles driven, so the average attendee's chance of a car crash on the way to the meetup is about 1 in 2000.
What is the probability you catch covid from another vaccinated attendee at a meetup where everybody is fully vaccinated? Hard to quantify, but probably lower than that. And if you do catch it while vaccinated, it will almost always be a very mild case not leading to hospitalization.
Back of the envelope, 99.5% of covid deaths in the US are unvaccinated, versus about half of the population is vaccinated, so the vaccine reduces individual risk of death from covid by 99% through some combination of reducing the risk of infection and reducing the severity post-infection. If covid was less than 100 times worse than the flu pre-vaccine (which seems to be supported by the death tolls), then post vaccine it's not much to worry about.
My null hypothesis is that media will continue to hype any new variant with a few SNPs that make it slightly more transmissible, without regard to the scope of the risk relative to ordinary activities like driving and smoking. Same thing with terrorism -- people find it more interesting than the scope of the risk warrants, so it gets more media coverage than it deserves.
CDC came out with a press release a few hours after i posted this advising vaccinated people to be afraid of delta and wear masks indoors because of a few cases of vaccinated people spreading delta. I'm not sure if I should trust that any more than the bush-era terrorism threat level thermometer. Every government agency has a self-serving bias that involves exaggerating threats to justify increasing its own budget. Being vaccinated reduces risk of catching it by a lot, and reduces risk of spreading it by a lot, so the probability of spread from a vaccinated person to a vaccinated person is reduced by a lot times a lot. The breakthrough cases almost all involve spread from unvaccinated people to vaccinated people or vice versa.
Sounds about right to me. Seems like a good example of the availability heuristic. Risks that are more salient are rated as more likely. Additionally, I think even when people know the numbers they relate to it emotionally as more dangerous.
Hang on, why do you assume Bay Area streets are four times as dangerous as average? They're busyish, yeah, but I started really noticing street design after I got my license, and our streets are amazingly well laid out.* Most of the Bay Area, at least that I've driven, is planned city, with San Francisco the exception. We have busy highways, but also they're *giant* highways. Pretty well set-up safety stuff, too - nice bright crosswalks, very visible to cars, and (at least where I've driven) fairly few unprotected left turns, and lots of left turn lanes. And people may occasionally run reds, but on the whole the rest of the traffic seems pretty nice here - if you signal, someone will probably let you in. It's not an environment that thrives on pushiness.
Are you assuming most miles driven are on empty country roads? And um... speaking of pushiness, if you think we're quadruple, what number on earth would you assign to Boston?
*With a few notable exceptions, but most of the ones I can think of are more annoying than dangerous, San Francisco explicitly excluded.
A wild guess based on high density plus lots of drugs. The state wide average deaths per mile for california is not worse than other states, but I couldn't find more granular data. Also maybe accidents are less-lethal in high density areas due to low speeds, so comparing deaths/mile could be understating the risk of damage or non-lethal injury.
OK, one smells marijuana occasionally. I can count on one hand the number of times I've seen someone driving as if he might be intoxicated in the last, say, five years, and it's usually late at night - I suspected drunk in all three cases, though of course I don't know. If people are driving stoned, they're doing an amazing job of having it be utterly invisible in their car body language.
I don't want to overstep, and I completely haven't looked at statistics - this is just from driving around a lot - but is it possible you're applying statements you've heard about (the worst bits of) San Francisco to the Bay Area as a whole? Like... I can think of *one* person I know who smokes marijuana; she's got pretty severe medical issues and uses it as a painkiller. One lives in a bubble, of course, but... you don't see stoned people wandering around the sidewalks, either. Sure, we legalized, and now every so often there's nasty smoke drifting into the yard, but on the whole people seem to take that stuff at home.
(And we've got plenty of high speed limits - the expressways are 45-50, the freeways 65, and both of them the actual normal speed is 5-10 miles over the speed limit, when they're not filling up. And the expressways are how you get around. Granted, I don't think accidents on them are that common - they tend to be wide, carefully designed, and kept in good repair - but you do see them occasionally.)
(Now, the mountains are different. The mountains are small roads in bad repair with too many curves and people going too fast, not to mention sheer cliff dropping away on one side of the road, and they scare me stiff; I have literally had a friend who lives there tell me I'm not to try to visit her until I've had a *lot* more experience driving. But that's mostly Highway 17, and I don't think most people would classify it as Bay Area.)
Does anyone think that the recent surge in house prices and rents prices is (at least partially) caused by the eviction and foreclosure moratoriums?
Certainly some of the house prices can be attributed to low mortgage rates (payments would be lower). But if people are not leaving the homes they can't afford (due to the moratoriums) then wouldn't that "distort" the market?
Just curious if anyone else sees it that way. I see a lot of people complaining that "hedge funds" are driving up prices. That could be. But I'm not sure where it goes from here.
I kind of feel the foreclosure moratorium should have the opposite effect, driving prices down by boosting supply. If you know you can't afford the house, and it's only a matter of time before you're forced out, then a sudden sharp rise in prices is a God-send -- sell the damn house right away and escape foreclosure, pocketing the extra cash (or eating a smaller loss) as a cherry on top. And the bank would totally agree with that perspective, I think.
My favorite theory for the price rise is fear of inflation -- and almost nothing is seen as more inflation-proof an asset than real estate -- coupled with a perception that these are abnormally low interest rates (due to fantastic waves of monetary stimulus) that won't be seen again for decades. In short, FOMO.
By the way, one side-prediction I have is that when the dust settles we'll see a rash of sad news stories about people in California (among other places) being stuck with incredible real estate tax bills because their valuations were set when they bought the house and the local assessor declines to reduce the valuation to something more reasonable now that prices have normalized (and given that states and counties are going to be hurting for $$ what with their recent COVID expenses). People around me are buying houses for $1.5 million that were $900k a year ago, and the difference between $15,000 and $9000 a year in property taxes is no joke.
My best guess is that the surge in house prices is driven by three major factors:
1. Lots of white-collar office workers, especially in high-paying fields like tech have been working from home since March 2020 and a large subset of them anticipate a hybrid WFH model (e.g. only go into the office 2-3 days/week) in the long term. This gives them a strong incentive to seek more space.
2. Also due to the pandemic, people have been spending a lot less on travel and entertainment. This makes spending a bunch of money on other things, such as bigger houses, a more affordable prospect.
3. Mortgage interest rates have gone down by a lot over the course of the pandemic, from 3.7% at the start of Jan 2020 to 2.8% today (source: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=FJ7L). This bumps up the "how much mortgage can I afford" amount by about 12% according to Google's mortgage calculator.
Would I go to (realistically, host) an in-person indoors ACX meetup in September? --> Depends on the local case rates, but probably not. My rough prediction is that they will still be highish by September and given high-risk status of household members, I'm inclined to be cautious. If they go back to normal, maybe. (Or if I am absolutely sure Covid isn't a serious risk to us, but I'm sufficiently risk-averse that that is a high bar.)
Would I consider it irresponsible to hold one? --> Depends on the local case rates. If they continue their current climb through September (seems highly unlikely, but so does the fact that they're climbing now) then yes. If they've crested and gotten halfway down, no. If they're back to baseline "I think this is probably false positive" levels, then absolutely not.
Scott: the "See all" link on the main page of the blog (Archive view sorted by most recent) is now only displaying the most recent 12 posts rather than lazy-loading through all of them (both before and after your most recent post). Archive view sorted by most popular is still displaying everything, but this is making it rather time-consuming to access old stuff since the order there isn't obvious.
I've confirmed with a friend that he's experiencing the same issue, so it's not my browser at fault, and it was fine a couple of days ago.
I've been following the group pile-on of Kelsey Piper over on the DSL forum, and I'm absolutely blown away - not for the first time - by what an incredibly nasty, vicious conversation it is over there, how truly horrible the people who dominate that conversation are, and how thin the veneer of rationalism is over the substance, which is nothing but sheer hatred: for the left, for minorities, for normies, for journalists, for anyone and everyone who isn't them.
The situation is that Piper, a Vox journalist who's also part of the rationalist community, wrote a couple of Tumblr posts back in 2019, the entire sum and substance of which was that she and others she knew found US border enforcement policies genuinely upsetting, and those who assumed that those feelings were cynical and performative were wrong. That's it. That's all they said. Later, before the end of Trump's term, she stopped posting on Tumblr entirely.
The hive mind on DSL has decided that: (1) These two Tumblr posts were part of a coordinated campaign of anti-Trump propaganda, as proven by the fact that Piper hasn't written anything about immigration since Biden's election. (2) Even though she never used her feelings as a policy argument, or argued for anything other than "These feelings exist," she must have been intentionally empowering others to do so. Apparently, you're accountable not just for what *you* say, but for everyone that DSL decides is on your side. We live in a society, I guess? (3) The fact that she apparently withdrew from Tumblr entirely before the election, and thus wouldn't be expected to write anything about Biden there, is only further proof of her dastardly scheming. (4) If she was sincere about her feelings on border enforcement, she would necessarily have written about them on Vox - even though that's not her beat on Vox and writing about anything in that professional capacity requires a substantial commitment. (5) If she had actually been dazed and crying herself to sleep in 2019 when this came to her attention, she would have been in that state continuously all this time - because, you know, that's totally how emotions work, fellow humans. Adjusting to a situation and going on with life, after being upset, isn't something that people do. No evil robots here! (6) If she had been a functional human being, she wouldn't have felt emotional distress about the suffering of people who weren't her friends or family in the first place. People who feel a human connection to others outside their tribe don't deserve to be taken seriously. This altruism bullshit is all well and good until someone actually *cares* about it, am I right?
Now these paragons of rationality are solemnly talking about what to do when the principle of charity breaks down, and acting like they have irrefutable proof of Piper's bad faith - whereas if they were capable of *practicing* clear thinking instead of just peacocking about it, they would know that they have no valid evidence at all. Piper, whose work is essentially to spread rationalist values in the mainstream media, is gamely engaging with these preposterous attacks. I don't know whether to admire her for it or shake my head at her for trying to reason with those who are manifestly not motivated by reason.
I would certainly go to a meet up within a reasonable distance if there was a good chance you’d be there. I would check out one nearer even if not. I do not consider it unreasonable to hold them, since for me the pandemic is largely over—I’m vaccinated, everyone I care for is either vaccinated or determined to take their chances, and the level of risk these days is simply not high; it’s time for life to go on.
Regarding the meetups - I run the Atlanta SSC meetup group - we've had over 12 so far - though the lockdown has put a damper on them for the past year or so (mostly we've moved online) - however
I speak for everyone in the group when I say we would all go to an indoors ACX meetup in September, and none of us consider it irresponsible to hold one.
I received the J & J. I’m pretty curious about the booster too.
Just to check: you understand that the mask doesn't protect you, right? It's supposed to protect *others* in case you're already infected. I ask because your wording seemed unclear to me: if you're worried about catching Indian Kung Flu (Shastarvidiya?), a booster shot might or might not be a good idea, but the mask is irrelevant to that. The mask is only relevant once you've *already caught Delta*.
I wasn't trying to be snide, friend. I just wanted to make sure you understood that you don't really need the mask to protect *you*; i.e. it doesn't have much to do with fear management.
I would be fine sending my unvaccinated elderly parent[1] into a room with known infected people if they were wearing a well-fitting N95, KN95, or P100 mask. They keep out particles very well, and the virus that we are worried about travels by particles.
Right now, even Delta isn't dangerous to fully vaccinated people. Your chance of death goes down by 3 or 4 orders of magnitude. If you are still concerned because reasons, and really don't want to wear a mask, you could get a blood test to verify that the vaccine worked properly. I think https://www.t-detect.com/ will detect that your cells work to detect and fight an infection, but their homepage says that information on vaccinated people is "pending."
[1] My parents are both vaccinated so this is theoretical.
> Right now, even Delta isn't dangerous to fully vaccinated people. Your chance of death goes down by 3 or 4 orders of magnitude.
Where does this figure come from? (Not disputing that the vaccine is very effective at preventing death, I'm just not sure it's *that* effective.)
As usual, any discussion of masks that doesn't mention which *type* of mask, is close enough to useless as makes no difference. People should be ashamed of writing articles like that. At least if you click through to the full text of the Lancet study, they acknowledge that some masks are better than others, but not in any qualitative way that would contextualize the "65%" number. And UC Davis doesn't even care.
This is correct in tendency, but as always, the truth is more complicated.
FFP2 masks protect you and others, and are very good at that in both directions.
For surgical masks, it is correct that the protective effect for others is higher than the effect for yourself. But the effect for yourself is still far from zero, perhaps more like 50% (only a ballpark number, it depends a lot on the situation).
Have you seen *anyone* wear an FFP2 mask in public? Maybe this is regional, I don't think I've seen a single one the whole pandemic. I'm highly skeptical of the surgical mask protection claims, after previous rounds of "let's juggle the truth to get the plebs to obey".
Yes, all the time. I am living in Switzerland. I would estimate that 20-30% of the people in public transport wear FFP2 masks, and I hear similar things from other places in Europe. It's also similar in other indoor situations. In Austria, it was even mandatory in public transport until a few weeks ago.
Obviously, it is quite different where you live.
So it is :D
I also have the impression that the "juggle the truth" scandal is mostly a US thing. What I got from the news at the beginning of the pandemic was "we don't know, and we don't want a mask shortage in hospitals, so please don't wear them".
I would have wished that the "we don't know" statement would have been dropped earlier, but I don't feel cheated. I don't remember officials telling me that masks would hurt, except for the quite reasonable warning "don't get careless just because you are wearing a mask".
Well, Switzerland. I recall once sitting in a public rose garden in some major Swiss city, forget which, and observing that (1) none of the beautiful free roses had been clipped and taken by random citizens, and (2) this was apparently accomplished by the city government merely posting a small sign by the entrance that said "please don't pick the roses."
First: I violently hate masks, so you have all my sympathy.
Second: I am not sure I am the kind of expert you want - I've been following the news a lot but have no special expertise on virology or immunology. Going on my impressions from things I've read, however:
Natural immunity is extremely reliable (not 100%, but close) for up to six months, and probably longer, versus the original variant. You get case studies of reinfection prior to that, but serious studies of preselected groups (those I could find when I did the research) find almost no cases. Vaccination is currently expected to be on a level with or better than (not sure why, but it's possible the big doses that lead to the nasty side effects actually do some good?) natural immunity, and IIRC we have at least decent six-month data on it from all the original trial populations. So against normal covid, I wouldn't worry about a booster until after 6 months past vaccination. You can get antibody tests which will tell you how your antibodies look; those may be useful for figuring out whether you need a booster shot. (This information is from my doctor, so take it with a grain of salt, I know there is non-antibody-mediated immunity and she isn't a covid specialist.) There are rumors of a mythical anti-Delta booster; if one comes out and it's for real, I would probably get it to get rid of Delta's slightly increased chance of breaking vaccine-derived immunity, but it is only a slightly increased chance, and someone else might make a different call.
The only reinfection case I personally know was at 10 months past initial infection, so I would at least try to check antibodies once you got much past 6 months.
I've got less data on Delta. My impression is that with Moderna, you're looking at about -5% immunity against Delta - that is, if you had 96% you now have 89%, or something around there. However, the error bars on this number seem pretty large (and the Israeli data looks much worse than the other studies for infection but normal for hospitalization/death, I'm not sure why - could they possibly be running into vaccines timing out already? I can't remember *just* how early they started. Or somehow testing a different subset of the population?) Everything I've seen, including the Israeli data, claims the vaccines are still unreasonably high against hospitalization/death for Delta, just as they have been for every other variant - but unreasonably high still isn't zero. One article I read claimed that about 98% of covid deaths in May (US or state? I can't remember and I can't find the article - sorry!) were unvaccinated, which of course means 2% were vaccinated. Some of that is going to be people with preexisting immune issues, but definitely not all. So for personal safety, how concerned you should be about Delta given that you're vaccinated (with two shots of a very effective vaccine) depends on how good health you're in, how old you are, and how risk tolerant you are. I am personally trying to minimize high-risk events right now, but I'm very intolerant of risk and very tolerant of staying home.
In terms of how likely you are to be hit with a mask mandate or social pressure, it depends entirely on where you are. If you're in California, high odds - the Bay Area is currently under threat of one (although so far it is county health officers asking businesses to impose one, not a state-wide mandate). If you're in a USA red state, I wouldn't worry, but you're asking so I doubt you are. Beyond that it's a matter of reading the winds of social opinion, and you will have much more insight into your area than I will. FWIW, my prediction is that local (to me) coronavirus cases will keep going up for at least the next few weeks and possibly the next month and a half, and I would make a weaker prediction to that effect for the USA as a whole. If my super-vaccinated county is getting a wave with the same kind of slope as earlier waves - and it is - then US-level vaccination is not going to be enough (though combined with other advantages, like less dense population or more I'm not thinking of, it might be - part of why that prediction is weaker.)
So... if that'd cause a mask mandate, and my calculations apply to your location, and I'm right (I am not a superforecaster) then you'll get one. I'm sorry, and I hope they don't. I also hope someone chimes in with better data; I'm strictly a dabbler and there's a lot of information I want to have and don't.
Good luck!
Great post!
I might add that UK is helpfully testing out whether it is ok to completely lift restrictions once you have a good portion vaccinated. And it looks pretty good at the moment. The numbers are going down, and the health care system is not heading to maxload. in Europe, this will probably cause a lot of other countries to to the same, and to relax restrictions (also concerning masks). I don't know whether it will have impact on US policies, too.
Uk has very high vaccination rates, but also used a lot of AstraZeneca, which is somewhat less effective. So it might be comparable to other countries. They do have a non-trivial number of hospitalisations. If I recall correctly, about 40% of hospitalisations are fully vaccinated people, and about half of those are people with suppressed immune system.
My personally conclusion is that for a fully vaccinated person without such conditions, corona is no more threatening than the flu for unvaccinated people, probably substantially less threatening.
I just received a message from another blog, citing https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.06.11.21258690v1.full.pdf which I haven't yet read.
The blog post concludes from the medical article that even mild or asymptomatic cases of covid result in significant loss of grey matter from the brain, particularly specific parts of the brain. The blogger theorizes it's setting people up for Alzheimer's.
I don't know of any evidence either way about "breakthrough cases" in vaccinated people having the same effect. (The cited data seems to have been available due to blind luck - it's a spinoff of some longitudinal brain research that started before covid.)
I haven't been reading the blog in question to rate the competency of the blogger, but if their claims are true, they should be better than I am at understanding such articles.
At any rate, this is the first credible source I've seen for widespread post-covid effects even in those with mild or asymptomatic cases. I fear it may be the tip of an iceberg. And I fear also that even "breakthrough" cases may turn out to be affected. Hopefully, my fears will be proven wrong eventually; meanwhile I'm glad that AFAIK I've (so far) avoided catching it.
For whatever it's worth, I'm very glad you've avoided catching it too - you're one of the people I worry about. I've heard a bit about that result, and I'm going to wait to pass judgment; I hope it's wrong, of course, but I'm keeping an eye on the case numbers and we'll reinstitute our preventative quarantine if it gets too bad. We've been doing a good bit of getting stuff that's needed taking care of for a while taken care of now, while we can, so we should be good to shut up again if necessary.
I should do a bit more of that (taking care of stuff that's been on hold for way too long, mostly because of covid); I've done some, but I've still got quite a bit left.
Correcting myself - I should NOT post pre-coffee - the blogger was citing different sources for loss of grey matter and relationship with Alzheimer's, and the only connection between them was that they were both mentioned in the same blog post.
One possible reason for the Israeli breakthrough infection rate is if they have more testing of vaccinated populations compared to other contexts, uncovering more cases of PCR positivity in asymptomatic or minimally symptomatic individuals (who I guess are baseline less likely to transmit than unvaccinated people with the same strain and symptom level but also Delta appears just generally easier to transmit in general). I don't know if that's the case, but if it were you'd expect to see lower total immunity numbers but not greater risk of severe disease or death compared to similarly vaccinated populations, like you do here.
Thank you very much. I could see that - I've been worrying about how accurate the numbers for asymptomatic cases in vaccinated populations are. My impression is that at least my state is mass-testing health care workers and teachers on a regular schedule, so you would think that would give us a test population (albeit a non-random one) to watch for frequency of breakthrough infections, but if there are any specific studies from that, I haven't seen them. (That said I've been less obsessive about checking than I was early-pandemic.)
That said, my feeling is that I strongly prefer a 96% chance of not having to test my 96% chance of not getting hospitalized or killed - you know? If the virus is spreading widely through the population, such that (sans precautions) I will get it, that is a much worse situation than if I have a very low chance of getting it *and* a very low chance of adverse effects if I do. That's why the Israeli data worries me as much as it does - especially if, as you theorize, it's more accurate than the rest.
I'm looking forward to having more data!
I don't think the Israeli data is more accurate than the rest. That is, testing PCR positive may not be a meaningful measure of infection in a substantial proportion of vaccinated people, who may have enough viral replication to test positive but not enough to transmit effectively, and no or minimal symptoms or long-term risk. If different testing approaches between Israel and other countries mostly adds these types of essentially false positives, it could reasonably be viewed as less accurate.
Mostly coming back to replay though because I saw some recent data that suggests the purported Israeli difference in vaccine effectiveness is likely due to a statistical issue. From what I gather, the initial Delta spread in Israel (speculation: presumably due to where it was initially introduced?) was in cities with very high vaccination rates, but the numbers were calculated initially using the (lower) average vaccination rate for the entire country. Using the wrong denominator makes it look like the risk of infection is higher in vaccinated people than it actually is (and this became clearer when Delta started to spread elsewhere in Israel?). https://mobile.twitter.com/dvir_a/status/1420059141083631617
Israel started vaccinating in December, around the same as most developed countries, but it mostly completed it by March.
The jump in case counts in Israel may be much bigger than in other countries just because they had suppressed the pre-Delta variants to much lower levels by the time Delta hit.
They also had a relatively low fatality rate throughout the pandemic, suggesting that they had better testing and caught a larger fraction of the cases than many countries.
It’s pretty sad that it exists as an area of research but good luck.
It would be hard to tell. It's one thing to be fired as a result of a public campaign, but much harder to tell if you're fired because of management being afraid of a public campaign.
I would also like to know if there's a name for this, as I do it constantly. I do have a reason, even if the behavior is unintentional: there are a lot of things to know, and if I had to store the reasons that I know all the things I know, I wouldn't be able to store as much knowledge. I've found that I recall the "why"s much better if they are inherently interesting to me (e.g. the proof of the irrationality of the square root of 2).
Honestly, this tendency is why I don't tend to debate people much.
Perhaps we should say you were persuaded but not educated.
Conservatism?
I'd say that conservatism is when society, rather than an individual, holds a strong conviction but has forgotten why.
Same thing, but with more participants. Can society hold a conviction without any individuals holding it?
Kind of a Moloch thing?
Possibly, though I think the more likely result is that society holds a view or even many views that no one can precisely articulate the reasons to support.
I still do not know what it means for society to hold a view. It could means that all members of society unanimously hold the view, but that seems impossibly stringent. Maybe you could supply an example of a view that some society has held? I am probably being too literal.
"Society" holds a view when a significant portion of the population holds that view such that minority views are shunned or hide their true feelings, or actively try to move towards the societal view.
A couple of examples from the recent past (1950s?) that are no longer "societal" level views - 1) You should not have a child out of wedlock, 2) You should go to church on Sunday (or be Jewish). A couple of examples of societal views that are true more recently in our history, and hold currently - 1) You should not be racist, 2) You should not assault a gay person for being gay.
Note that none of these examples were 100% followed by everyone in society, and it's likely that quite a few more people secretly disagree with them but are unwilling to express that due to societal pressure to follow the general rule.
It turns out that in academic philosophy, "epistemic conservatism" is in fact the phrase used for precisely the phenomenon in question here!
https://philpapers.org/s/epistemic%20conservatism
As expressed by Humphrey Bogart in Key Largo: "When your head says one thing and your whole life says another, your head always loses."
It happens all the time with me! But when I'm in a conversation or an argument I make a point to admit that I may not remembering the original source correctly. Usually I can use Google to find the original link/document. Frequently though I find I've somewhat misremembered what I originally read. I try to make a point of correcting myself. Unfortunately, the further you search back in time, the harder it is to find the article you're mentally referencing. Ive started to bookmark any link that's remotely interesting — which creates its own search issues when you have several thousand bookmarks...
For exactly this (vaguely remembering that I read something but not knowing anymore where exactly) I'm currently building a kind of personal search engine.
Which allows me to search through the full text of all my bookmarks, and also ebooks and papers I've read, notes I've taken in various systems etc.
It's not yet public though. But for full-text bookmark search maybe check out https://pinboard.in/.
That's a cool idea! I'll check it out.
When you believe in things
That you don't understand,
Then you suffer,
Superstition aint the way
How do we suffer from belief? For instance, unless you can prove your hypothesis that we suffer from belief, that's a belief. Are you suffering for this belief? ;-)
Unless I understand it.
"The genuine rationalist does not think that he or anyone else is in possession of the truth; nor does he think that mere criticism as such helps us achieve new ideas. But he does think that, in the sphere of ideas, only critical discussion can help us sort the wheat from the chaff. He is well aware that acceptance or rejection of an idea is never a purely rational matter; but he thinks that only critical discussion can give us the maturity to see an idea from more and more sides and to make a correct judgement of it."
—Karl Popper, "On Freedom" in All Life is Problem Solving (1999)
When you believe in things
That you don't understand,
Then you have not engaged in the sort of critical discussion that can give us the maturity to see an idea from more and more sides and to make a correct judgement of it.
Superstition ain't the way.
—Stevie Wonder and Karl Popper
What's your definition of superstition? Would any assumption that you have not tested be superstitious? For instance, would a belief that your parents are your biological parents be a superstitious belief? After all, they could have adopted you without telling you.
Of course, if you're a true rationalist you'll make sure get your folks and you to send swabs of your DNA off to Ancestry dot com to test your assumption. Otherwise you'll still be mired in the superstitious assumption that your parents are your natural parents. Before you jump in and answer this with a statement of certainty, remember that a lot of people who've taken these tests have been surprised to find out that their father wasn't their real father. Likewise, a enough white supremacists have discovered to their discomfort that they have some African American ancestry in their background — enough to publicly claim that these DNA testing companies are purposely lying about data to combat their racial purity agenda.
Anyway, that's neither here nor there. But would it cause you a wee bit of discomfort (aka suffering) if you discovered that your dad wasn't your biological dad? And would you spread your suffering in the name of Truth to the dad who raised you? So, in light of these hypotheticals, would you like to narrow down your arguments about superstition, understanding, and suffering?
Took me a minute to pull up the song title.
" Is there a name for this?"
One instalment of the comic Subnormality (which a cursory search failed to locate or I would have linked it) actually does feature a new word for exactly this. It's a neologism that went nowhere, though, so "officially" there is no word.
This is a standard sort of problem case in academic philosophy - the view that these beliefs are justified is much like the view known as "epistemic conservatism", but not quite the same: https://philpapers.org/s/epistemic%20conservatism
(The difference being that some people will say that all that matters for justification is the presently held strong belief, while others will say that it matters whether the past self actually did have good justification.)
"Compression".
Which is generally seen as A Good Thing, so I find it interesting that there can be so many negative associations with the process you mention (complacency, inflexibility, confirmation-bias, evidence blindness, wilful epistemic learned helplessness, etc).
It's helped me to internalize the idea that they get to have opinions and I get to have opinions. There is no qualitative difference.
My current framing of a similar issue is that it's a matter of plain social anxiety. Core of the problem being that I genuinely, deeply fear judgement, and the [nebulous sense of] damage to my reputation / sense of self it might cause. And progress is made by viscerally realizing how this fear is overblown. Nancy's idea-internalization strikes me as one pump for this.
Huh, I think I may be the opposite. If someone tells me something my first reaction is, "what about this other side of it?" When pushed I tend to push back, even when I perhaps agree with the direction someone is pushing me.
This kinda lines up with my transition from Liberal to Woke Adjacent.
The inciting event was the reaction of the white moderates/mild conservatives around me to the Kaepernick NFL kneeling situation. I watched them go from "This is outrageous, he should be fired/fined/arrested" to "what are black people even complaining about, MLK would be ashamed" to "Blacks are the most privileged group of people in the USA".
It did seem like some sort of mental disease, like these otherwise perfectly reasonable and kind people gathered into groups and mutually convinced themselves that "This (https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/texas-police-officer-shoots-woman-death-inside-her-home-n1065451) was fine actually."
There are a million cops in the US. Black people are victimized by cops at much lower than the relative to white rate they commit crime and murder cops. I.e. rate(white victimized by police)/rate(white crime) = (1.2 ~~~~4.0)rate(black victimized by police)/rate(black crime) for various crimes and victimizations.
Conservatives being 100 iq shouldn’t change that black people aren’t being murdered by the millions by the boys in blue.
Those rate of crime arguments leave out whether innocent black people are getting victimized by the police.
Some do, but at vastly smaller rates than are reported. Almost every popular story about police being mean to blacks people is twisted from the origin of the story to the point of being made up. and folds under light prodding. It’s not like there’s a bunch of Jews hiding in the server rooms making fake articles, the internet is just a mess and lots of videos and stories get chopped up and shared and it’s har to interpret stuff, and everyone looks really hard for how black people might be victimized even when it doesn’t happen. Sampling from a 350M strong country where half the people have tiny cameras, and base rate fallacy!
Meanwhile in progressive legal aid land there are lots of objectively awful things done to people, many of them black, by the police and especially the legal system. But the two don’t really overlap in content as much as you’d expect.
There's stop and frisk, which led to a lot of young black men being harassed by the police.
The Innocence Project finds a fair number of mostly black men with long prison sentences for crimes they didn't commit. It takes a long fight and solid evidence, and I assume they aren't finding all the cases.
You may be right about the most well-known cases, but that's just an argument from public attention.
I mean, given that those stats are
A: Wrong,
and
B: Irrelevant
I don't know what you want from me here.
They're more concerned with language than actual pathogens:
https://www.overcomingbias.com/2020/07/beware-righttalkism.html
Which is why early on they were denouncing people as xenophobic if they worried about COVID, and even afterward insisted that diseases shouldn't be named after their place of origin even though the prior pandemic this always gets compared to is the Spanish flu (which technically wasn't the place of origin, but just the place to first report it because it was neutral).
I'm not gonna pretend that that wasn't a hysterical over-reaction, and in exchange, you don't pretend that the "Chai-Nah Virus"/"Kung Flue" is purely neutral and not even a little bit totally fucking political.
There was widespread use of terms like 'Wuhan coronavirus' and 'China's coronavirus' before it was decided that this was a useful weapon in the culture war.
Once it was used as a weapon, it automatically became political, one way or the other.
China is way too big a place, and the original SARS also came from there, so it really should be narrowed down further with "Wuhan".
Greek letters for the variants might be better than place names, considering that the place names are only where the variants were first noticed and possibly not where they originated.
The other thing is that nations are large or fairly large, and attribution to big regions isn't really much information.
I think that place names are much easier to distinguish than Alpha, Beta, Gamma, Delta, Eta, Iota, Kappa and Lambda. Beta and Eta are even hard to distinguish in speech. It seems aggressively elitist in that the one thing that the name encodes, that one variant is newer than another, is probably not something that most normal people would get, due to their lack of knowledge of the Greek alphabet. If they'd used the regular alphabet, it would at least have one clear benefit.
The big benefit of naming by place is that the early reporting typically mentions that place a lot, so the place name gets strongly connection to this variant. In contrast, spreading codes like Iota is purely artificial. This is even more true for the original variant. Who knows that this is called Alpha? I never see it mentioned.
The media can't really establish the new name without referring to China a lot, to transfer the association, but they are unwilling to name China due to their politics. So instead, they write their stories to keep it vague.
This issue is always going to exist, because the early reporting is never going to put a lot of effort into distinguishing the only existing variant from potential future variant. So you'll always end up having to retrofit a letter on that initial variant. When you use place names, the variant already has a designation.
Alpha is the 'British' variant, not the original one: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SARS-CoV-2_Alpha_variant
It sure would make more sense for it to be the original one but alas, it's not.
I guess that this proves my point. I would never have made this mistake if they'd referred to it as the British one.
I don't understand why you think it's a relevant thing for people to connect a variant to a place and time.
Because those are the least arbitrary and easiest to notice aspects of the variant, making them the best ways to describe it. It also reflects that people commonly differentiate between things spatially and temporally.
It seems pretty universal that we can agree on where and when we start noticing a variant.
Note that the WHO also prefers to use a semi-temporal designation, as their Greek letters are ordered by order of discovery. Scientists also started off with temporal naming. The British strain was initially know as the 202012/01 variant. And yes, that is a date. Yet in subsequent naming without the date, you see that scientists are using different names: B.1.1.7 and 20I/501Y.V1. So you can see that as soon as they stop using the temporal designation, the naming becomes more arbitrary, divergent and less informative for outsiders. This lack of consistency happened despite these scientists being part of a fairly insular community which should make it easier for them to decide on a common name than the world at large.
Like Aapje said, it's hard to remember what those arbitrary Greek letters stand for, whereas it's easier to remember Ebola.
just as my 5 cents, I probably prefer the greek letters (but I’m a math person, so I’m really used to them), but I found the swap from places to greek letters for COVID variant names difficult, since I couldn’t tell which matched up and thus couldn’t apply my previous knowledge to new articles easily.
And the Greek letters don't seem odd to me, partly because I read Brave New World when I was a kid.
"even afterward insisted that diseases shouldn't be named after their place of origin"
This is WHO policy since 2015. Back in February and March I was worried that this was getting lost in discussion of the variants, but the Greek letters are very helpful this way.
How is it an argument that WHO policy has been shit for several years already?
As I said, they *fixed* that shit policy six years ago. Someone above was pointing out that people continued to use the misleading location-based names for other diseases, which doesn't seem like a way to justify the policy.
"[D]iseases shouldn't be named after their place of origin" is the shit policy to which I refer, obviously. I thought you said the WHO had adopted this (shit) policy six years ago.
Oh, I got confused. I didn't realize you were *defending* the policy of naming diseases after places, when "Spanish flu" was the most prominent example given. It seems to me pretty obvious that you want to name a disease after its intrinsic features, so that people don't get confused, either by actual historical events that are no longer relevant (a disease that becomes endemic in a location different from the one it first appeared) or by fake historical events (like Spanish flu).
Is there some reason that you think naming diseases after places, or other extrinsic features, is a *good* thing, that we should do *despite* the clear problems it can lead to? (For purposes of this discussion, I will not make any mention of xenophobia or racism as potential problems, since I don't expect you are sympathetic to considering those to be problems here.)
Relatedly, the Ebolavirus is named after a river in the Congo.
And Ebola Marburg is named after a lab in Germany.
A friend of mine says it's because it's full of conservatives.
His theory is that the liberal counterculture was successful enough for long enough that a large chunk of the next generation of predisposed clannish conservatives adopted the superficial facade of the counterculture as their clan, and took it over from the liberals.
This is obviously a rather grim possibility.
If the woke are traditionalists whose tradition is leftism, then I'd expect them to have liberal parents.
Though I know woke people with conservative parents, and I'm not sure I know any with liberal parents.
Assuming that until the 90s liberalism correlated greatly with progressivism (and likewise assuming my friend's hypothesis), there'd be two effects. There'd be the genetic component to liberalism biasing the kids of progressives away from fourth-wave feminism (and toward the Grey Tribe i.e. the modern counterculture), but there'd also be the direct and indirect parental components* to cultural transmission biasing the conformist kids of progressives toward fourth-wave feminism (and away from traditional conservatism). The most obvious test (though not the easiest) would be examining the rate of fourth-wave feminism among biological children of conformist conservatives that were adopted by liberal progressives; it ought to be huge if this hypothesis is correct.
*Direct component = parents teach children values. Indirect component = parents seek to avoid schools/friends/places that will teach kids opposing values (e.g. traditional conservatives keeping their kids out of big cities during childhood and objecting to their kids being taught CRT; atheist parents keeping their kids out of religious schools and objecting to their kids being taught scripture).
In this view, "racism as disease" is more of a downstream effect of the conservative mindset.
I think this is broadly accurate but minus "conservatives". It's true that the pearl-clutching, fearful and narrow-minded "Mrs. Lovejoy" personality has traditionally been on the conservative side; it's also true (not to say blatantly obvious) that these personality types switched sides for some reason in the 2000s, but being a prig is something essentially distinct from believing in e.g. traditionalism or free market capitalism. I think it's both pat and liberal-self-congratulatory to classify them inherently as conservatives.
I'm not sure exactly what happened, but I'd hazard a guess that it has to do with feminism. Feminism became culturally hegemonic among women in the way you mention, such that it became an extreme low-status marker (or, conversely, high as a countersignal) for a woman not to be a feminist. Now, women have *always* made up the vast majority of neurotic forced-conformists (hence all the older terms, pejoriative or not, being heavily gendered), so once they had to conform to feminism, feminism itself automatically became conformist priggishness. You can see this pretty clearly in interactions between prominent early feminists and screechy twitter-feminists, the former often being baffled by the total disavowal of liberty and individualism by the latter in favor of strict Maoist conformism.
Scott earlier used the term "Mrs. Grundy": https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/04/22/right-is-the-new-left/
Indeed; Mrs. Grundy is a classic term for this type of person – another one of those gendered pejoratives, natch (which I only now see that I misspelled in my previous comment; d'oh!). I however belong to a generation more influenced by the early seasons of The Simpsons (and perhaps more low-brow than Scott et consortes); so that's where my associations go.
He's the one who insisted on calling them "conservatives", and I agree there's some tension there.
I confess I sometimes have racist ideas that pop into my head. It is not a hard confession to make, because I am pretty sure that nobody who grew up in the West in the 1980s and 1990s can avoid having racist, sexist, ableist, etc., ideas popping into their head. The difference between a racist asshole and not is not having the ideas or not, it is saying them or not. When a racist idea pop into my head, I think “this is racist: why did I think that? how can I avoid thinking it again?”. Sometimes I miss, and I am sorry for it. Acts and intents; no thought crimes.
Stated like that, it seems obvious to me that racism should be considered like a disease, much more than a moral failing.
And that is a very non-woke position!
Because you do not treat a disease by shouting at the sick.
The main arsenal of the woke against racism is made of shaming, insults, trying to get fired. This is not how to efficiently address a disease, this is how to treat an irreconcilable enemy.
I would rather not actively think about it, since I have trained myself to decrease it, and it was never that in the first place bad since my family is quite decent. It would be something along the lines: upon learning bad about somebody, thinking “of course [bad thing], they're [skin color]”, and then having to remind myself that it is the kind of comments awful politicians make, absolutely not the kind of comments I want to make.
Hmm, no offense and not trying to troll you but that sounds weird to me. Do you consider race a genetic/ ancestry thing? Or a social construct (which in the US is mostly, "if you look 'black' you are treated as 'black'." I've come around to the social construct view. The word 'race' is almost a word I don't want to use, because we aren't using the same definition.
To the best of my knowledge, race is a social phenomenon rooted in over-emphasizing a bunch of barely-related phenotype traits and a lot of mysticism about ancestry.
But I fail to see how it relates to my point. What I was saying is that when I grew up, people all around me, on TV, etc., would make racist comments or jokes, and since our brains learn by imitation, mine learned to generate the same kind of comments or jokes, and is now still wasting my time generating them. I have been contaminated by racism when young, and now I must make efforts to not let it turn me into an asshole.
OK that's fine. I do sometimes find myself making misogynistic jokes and then having to hold my tongue. So I understand why you might call it a disease, some attitude/ belief/ view that you grew up with and are now trying to shake.
I've got this evolutionary view of racism, that it is in part a way to separate 'the other' from my community/ family. So Us vs. Them. Moving beyond that and seeing worth in 'the other' is a higher calling. And rather than a disease, racism is part of the 'software' baggage that we carry from the past. The distinction from a disease is it perhaps had some utility in the past. (Deep past)
I would follow this reasoning:
1. It is best for us all when almost everybody can get close to their full potential.
2. Social pressure and low-key discrimination against categories of people can prevent some from getting close to their full potential.
3. ∴ It would be better to reduce and eliminate social pressure and low-key discrimination against categories of people.
4. Offhand jokes against categories of people perpetuate social pressure and low-key discrimination.
5. ∴ It would be better to refrain from making them.
My generation has heard these offhand jokes in our youth, we cannot refrain from thinking them, and we probably cannot fully refrain from letting them taint our behavior, making us vectors of social pressure and low-key discrimination (but a lot less than the people who do not make efforts, which is where the woke are dead wrong).
But we can refrain from saying them, we can hold our tongue. If we do, our children will not ear these offhand jokes in their youth, and not learn to imitate them, and they will not become vectors of social pressure and low-key discrimination, or at least less. And that makes the world better.
Artificial memetic selection.
In a way, it is like wearing a mask to prevent infecting other people with a respiratory disease, not because it serves us right now: if we are contagious, we already have the disease, but because it serves all of us in the long run.
It is slow, it is not enough, but it is something we can all do with minimal effort.
After all, what is the point of making misogynistic jokes? Getting a cheap laugh from fellow assholes? Better just shut up.
In fewer words: “Be the change you want to see in the world.” — not Gandhi.
Oh, because it may be funny to me and my friends, but someone who doesn't know me could be offended and get the wrong idea. A common example. I'm an air head, always forgetting stuff. I will joke that this would be more expected if I was a platinum blond with a big bosom... playing into the 'dumb blonde' stereotype.
I'm inclined to think that having ethnic ingroup/outgroup preferences is a basic human thing, but dividing people into large groups based on skin color is a fairly modern invention.
Yeah, I sorta see ingroup/ outgroup as 'thinking fast' with our brain. And to move above that is to 'think slowly'. But we don't always do that (think slowly) And in fact to 'think slowly' all the time is not how we are built. Maybe we need to distinguish 'fast thinking' racism from 'slow thinking' racism. It seems much more complicated to me than, so and so is a racist.
> Stated like that, it seems obvious to me that racism should be considered like a disease, much more than a moral failing.
> And that is a very non-woke position!
I think that the 'official' woke position is to consider it a disease, but to consider anyone who doesn't adopt the woke ideology as someone who refuses treatment. So in their view, they are not attacking people for being racist, but for not wanting to do anything about it.
But of course in practice this distinction is often not made this way. It's part of a common pattern where the ideological underpinnings often get ignored when they clash with the desires of the believers. And of course, they can always just claim that the person is not working hard enough to eradicate their racism, to justify an attack.
>Stated like that, it seems obvious to me that racism should be considered like a disease, much more than a moral failing.
>And that is a very non-woke position!
>Because you do not treat a disease by shouting at the sick.
You do if you think the disease is incurable and contagious and what you're shouting is "go find a leper colony; you're no longer welcome among us".
The case for enchantment https://whatiscalledthinking.substack.com/p/the-case-for-enchantment
I enjoyed this very much, it was the perfect length where it would have been easy to waffle.
Thank you for sharing
"I’m interested in the community’s opinion: would you go to an in-person indoors ACX meetup in ~September? Would you consider it irresponsible to hold one? "
I would not go (but I wouldn't be going even without Covid). I would not consider it irresponsible to hold one.
How about treating the SSC community like adults, advertise the meetings if anyone wants to host, add a line mentioning that Covid is still a thing and letting folks decide for themselves?
In general, I am okay (up to a point, but a fairly tolerant point) with letting people make decisions about their own lives even if I think it is a mistake. I'm even okay shouldering some externalities to enable this, hoping that folks return the favor if I want to take different risks than they do.
Even if you respect people's right to freely make decisions knowing what decisions they're inclined to make can make your life a lot easier. In this case, Scott doesn't want to go to all the effort of organizing and advertising meetups if nobody's going to go anyway.
To expand on Paul's comment, it's also helpful to know why people are inclined to various decisions. "I'm not interested in going because the time doesn't work for me" is different from "I'm not going because I don't enjoy social gatherings" is different from "I'm not going because I'm nervous about COVID". As an organizer, you get different information and feedback from each response, and there are usually things you can improve at low cost (for example, if a lot of people say they can't go on a saturday, you could probably move it to a sunday without much issue and get more people to show up. Especially if you are indifferent towards saturday vs sunday, that's a low cost way of getting a better meetup)
On the situation in Germany: social gatherings have restrictions, mostly based on current case numbers (defined as pos cases in the last week per 100k residents), with the highest mode of restrictions at 50 cases / week / 100k (currently at 13 and rising) limiting gatherings to 5 persons from two households, but not counting fully vaccinated or confirmed recovered.
Larger group gatherings have additional rules, but in theory, it should be possible to hold a 100-person gathering of fully vaccinated if enough space is available. Still a bit risky (assuming you really manage all rules correctly) and honestly speaking, waiting for next spring might be the way easier option.
I would not normally go to any ACX meetup; it's just not my crowd. However, in the current pandemic situation, I would not go to a meetup even if you paid me. I do consider holding one irresponsible.
I'd be happy to host a Greater London ACX meetup in August / early September, but probably a picnic outdoors not a pub meet or indoor venue...
What do Adam Grant, David Sedaris, and Foucault have in common? https://whatiscalledthinking.substack.com/p/does-power-obscure-perception
You've over-intellectualized the issue. When you have something people want they lie to you. Lies are bad because they don't allow you to correctly model the world. This in turn leads to bad outcomes long term.
Imagine a king. He has power so everyone lies to him about their loyalty and faith and efficiency. And then he finds he's got nobody loyal to him or faithful or efficient and he loses his throne. Imagine an attractive woman. She has looks and social grace so people lie about to her about how intelligent she is or how interesting or how much they love her. And then she finds she's not as smart or loved as she thought and ends up alone once her looks fade.
And so on and so forth. It is a real problem and one that people have a great deal of difficulty solving. One of the benefits of not mattering is that people have no incentive to lie and so many will, on balance, be truthful. But once you have anything they want they have a strong incentive to lie. Many do not resist that.
That's why Mother Nature and Papa Natural Selection have largely solved it for us. Almost everybody is born wired up with something that we often call a conscience but which in any case makes it difficult to lie fluently to people with whom you have strong social connections (and even to strangers, to some extent). For the most part, only psychopaths (who are rare) can lie easily and fluently to everyone. Most of us turn red, look at our feet, stammer, and give off about ten thousand tells that are relatively easily detected.
No doubt there are plenty of people who think this is all a result of solid child-rearing, sturdy social mythology, excellent primary schooling et cetera but I don't think so, I think it's in the DNA, and for the simple reason you point out: that the consequences of fluent lying in a species as social as ours are sufficiently disastrous that any subpopulation which lacked inborn "consciences" was wiped out long ago.
Which is why nobody is ever deceived by the people close to them, infidelity is all but unheard of, etc.
Seriously that take is simplistic and proves far too much. Flattery and sucking up to higher status people is one of the core human behaviors. It's usually only minor amounts of deliberate conscious deception, with the bulk made up of focusing on the positives while deemphasizing negatives, and of course self-deception: your conscience can't keep you from fooling someone else if you've already fooled yourself.
I think you are taking what I suggest to an extreme I didn't intend, and so the oversimplificaiton is yours, not mine.
The fact that people are born with a wired-in "conscience" that makes it *hard* to lie to people close to them doesn't mean it's *impossible* -- that they can never do so. Nature generally doesn't work in the black-and-white terms we might see in a computer program, she works in competing general tendencies and pressures.
Id est, the conscience makes it much harder to lie to your friends and family, but of course it doesn't make it *impossible* -- and so, therefore, people sometimes do. Sometimes in fact it's a good or at least necessary thing to do. But note that it *is* difficult, and most people need powerful supportive reasons to overcome "conscience." Most people find it difficult to be unfaithful and lie about it to their partners, and that is while deception by people close to you, or infidelity, are not "unheard of" but they are much less common than if people had zero instinctual internal aversions to them.
A worrying hypothesis: Azathoth seems to have also provided us with a mechanism for coming to believe our own self-serving lies in order to better deceive others. Simler writes about one aspect of that here - https://meltingasphalt.com/crony-beliefs/ - and Franklin in relation to religions here - https://thefutureprimaeval.tumblr.com/post/130867775523/sanity-for-sociality-a-theory-of-religion . I haven't read Hanson and Simler's book The Elephant In The Brain yet, but if you're interested in blackpills on the question, I gather that that's the place to look.
"You’re going to fail in your dream to become a great cosmologist, have a less colourful life than most people, and spend a lot of time at church."
That may or may not be true for Mormons, which is the example he is using in that piece, but why does he think a Mormon couldn't study cosmology? I think his assumptions there are "Well, cosmology is part of Science, and once a Mormon or any other believer encounters Science, *plainly* their irrational beliefs cannot hold in the face of that! So you stop believing, and go on to cosmology, but lose the benefits of the strong social bonds that I am touting".
Given that the originator of the Big Bang Theory was a Belgian priest, and that the Vatican Observatory seems to be happily tootling along, I don't know if cosmology and religious belief are as incompatible as he thinks:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georges_Lema%C3%AEtre
http://www.vaticanobservatory.va/content/specolavaticana/en.html
I suspect that the Catholic Church just is much more compatible with modern cosmology than the LDS Church, simply on the basis of the Mormons having made some specific empirically falsifiable outer-space-related claims in the 19th Century that the Catholics don't make - but I can't claim to be particularly well versed. I don't know if Tracing Woodgrains can give us any detail?
Are you suggesting that the Catholic Church never made any empirically falisfiable claims about the nature of outer space? Really? Admittedly it was earlier, but then the Catholics have a pretty serious first-mover advantage on the Mormons.
Brigham Young University is a very strongly LDS university, and they have no problems whatsoever managing to have a reasonable Physics department, as well as an outstanding Computer Science department. (Not a physicist, so can't really comment on the strength of their Physics department.)
I guess you're talking about Kolob or maybe Brigham Young's thinking that maybe dinosaur bones are from other planets when God collected the "matter" to make ours? There are some odd ideas, but nothing that out there, and nothing that's really part of the core theology that would be a problem.
I'm an active, temple-going Latter-day Saint, son of a BYU Religion professor, and I also own 4 telescopes of varying capabilities and love learning about space and time. Anecdotal, I know, but I PERSONALLY feel I'm pretty well versed in both LDS theology and cosmology, and I don't find a conflict. Mormons do good work in paleontology as well.
Simler seems to ignore the fact that people can and do lie about their beliefs. I can ignore the incompetence of the boss's nephew while being aware of it; if I choose to thank him for his contributions to the project, giving some examples, the fault is mine if my sarcasm is evident or the attested contributions were obviously useless or not his. What I say is not necessarily what I believe.
Okay, Franklin goes even further and suggests it's hard to pretend enough to be a Mormon without being a true believer. Maybe that's true for some people, maybe that's true for Mormonism. I don't think is is true generally.
I am pretty honest about my beliefs as a rule, but I find it perfectly easy to shut up when it is useful.
I don't think either of them are making the claim that people *never* consciously lie about their beliefs, just that lying takes more cognitive effort than relaying what you believe to be true, and that there is therefore a *selective advantage* in being able to internalise a self-serving falsehood in a way that bypasses the conscious mind.
Well, the general problem is that "lie" is in some cases just a pejorative way to describe "dream" or "inspirational vision," or if you prefer the latter two are just in some cases glowing ways to describe "false and destructive delusion."
In all of these cases, what we're describing is a depiction of reality (or potential reality) which is contrary to facts already known (to speaker or listener), or which can be reasonably inferred. But whether we call this a "lie" or "a beautiful inspiring hope" (or even just "a necessary simplification") is a very subjective thing, and different people are quite capable of coming to radically different judgments about it.
But a priori that tells us that Nature can't make us *incapable* of lying, because sometimes "lying" (= telling people hopeful but empirically dubious dreams of the future) can have a powerfully positive effect on group survival. So she has to balance the good that can come from telling others tales with the bad that can also come from it. That, I assume, is why we have all these wired-in instincts about when saying things that aren't known to be factually true is OK and when it is not, and we struggle with cases on the borderline, both as individuals and as a society.
Although that explanation is attractive, I prefer not to be a sucker for biobehavioral just-so stories. Questions that immediately come to mind: (1) if there is a genetic basis for sociopathy, can we see different levels across different populations?; (2) do we see lower levels of sociopathy in cultures with large extended families?; (3) if there is genetic basis do we see any alleles in the human genome that have a high correlation for this behavior? Considering that we naturally form social hierarchies (even hunter gatherer societies have some social ranking), it would seem that lying without detection would offer all sorts of survival advantages. But various psychological studies have proved our individual theory of mind is not very effective in reading other people. Even if people don't lie effectively, most people aren't very good on picking up those lies.
"Of course, one paradox that might arise from these dynamics is that we should expect writers to get worse as they get more famous—insofar as they end up attracting more performativity on the part of their subjects."
Are you referring to non-fiction writers? Because there is the phenomenon of "too big to edit" - once a writer becomes a reliable cash cow for their publisher, there is a reluctance to do anything that might drive them away into the arms of another, rival, publisher, and part of that is the writer insisting on their way when it comes to editing their books.
Stephen King and J.K. Rowling are two examples of "the bigger the got, the more bloated their books got". From this Guardian article of 2011 lamenting the lost art of editing:
"One freelance editor I talked to remarked that "big companies used to have whole copy-editing and proof-reading departments. Now you'll get one publisher and one editor running a whole imprint." She'd noticed that some editors tended to acquire books that arrived in a more or less complete state. From her own experience, she also noted that writers at the beginning of their careers were far more open to suggestions than those further down the line; one suspects that that must always have been the case, but it's her opinion that writers with a healthy sales history have become more powerful, and their editors less. "It's certainly easy to imagine that writers with a lot of financial clout – whether literary prizewinners or mass-market bestsellers – feel that they have gained immunity from having their work tinkered with."
I think Stephen King has stabilized with books of reasonable length. On the other hand, I've only sampled his more recent work.
His more recent work is better, if not quite as good as when he was at his peak. There was definitely a period when he just ran rampant with length - it started with "The Stand" which really should have been a trilogy due to its length, number of characters, and intertwining plot lines. He wanted it as one book, though, and when he had the clout he issued the "Director's Cut", so to speak, adding in *more* material:
"In 1990, The Stand was reprinted as a Complete and Uncut Edition. King restored over 400 pages from texts that were initially reduced from his original manuscript, revised the order of the chapters, shifted the novel's setting from 1980 to 10 years forward, and accordingly corrected a number of cultural references. The Complete and Uncut Edition of The Stand is considered to be King's longest stand-alone work with its 1,152 pages, surpassing King's 1,138-page novel It."
"It" was another door-stopper but held together better, due to the two main chronological divisions of first the story with the characters as children, then as adults. It could certainly have been trimmed down more, but it was at the limit of what he could do.
Then he really got into the swing of it with the Dark Tower series; I grimly ploughed my way through the later volumes because I wanted to see how the story ended, but my God, those books should have been edited with a chainsaw! Bloated, over-stuffed, meandering, and by the time you got to the end you had forgotten where the start was.
I actually quite enjoyed the uncut "Stand", but doorstoppers are a known weakness of mine. I think that the main issue with writers who have become "uneditable" is that many of them could benefit from editing. (I'm looking at GRRM here.)
Yeah, it's the whole "kill your darlings" bit. Authors do get enamoured of their own work, and feel that they have cut every bit they needed, and any changes you want are going to ruin the work.
Particularly when they're Big Names with a track record of being "and I am your most profitable author for the past twenty years, I think I know how to write a best-selling book by now". When they start demanding 'creative control', as it were, it's hard for the publisher to say "no" because they're fully aware Big Name Author can just walk out the door and have all their rivals in a bidding war to sign them up.
What recent King do you recommend? I liked Joyland.
I've read up to "Gwendy's Button Box" which came out in 2017. I've hummed and hawed about the detective ones, the Bill Hodges Trilogy and haven't started them yet.
I liked "Doctor Sleep" which was the sequel to "The Shining". I thought that a sequel could have been a terrible mess, but on the whole, I think King handled it well. It doesn't have the same manic intensity as "The Shining" but that is as much down to King being older and having gone through a lot more since he wrote the original.
"Revival" in a way is classic King, but the more cynical, hopeless King. Generally he has some kind of way out or at least beneficent force opposing the malevolence, but this one is pure nihilism all the way. I don't know if I'd recommend it, unless you can handle "and the ending makes H.P. Lovecraft's view of the universe look like 'My Little Pony'".
He does seem to have gone through a period where his later writing was "the universe is actively cruel and hates humanity and wants to make us suffer, and all the gods and angels and fairytales we tell ourselves about goodness and heaven are just that - fairytales that will crumble in the face of the evil and cruel reality". He's come back from that a bit, I think.
As in "Gwendy's Button Box", which ends very *nicely* for a King story. I kept expecting him to drop the other shoe and have Horrible Things happen to the main character, but no. Maybe because he co-wrote it with someone else?
The ones since 2017 I haven't bothered with, since they sounded like re-treads of short stories or other novels he had already written. I might change my mind on one or two of them; I'm waiting for the new one, "Billy Summers", that is coming out soon.
Joyland was a solid horror/ghost story. Possibly of interest here because it also has a lot about the business of carnivals, especially the booths for winning prizes.
It's said that the reason John Steinbeck's later novels are so poor is because he'd turn in the first drafts. Why bother to do more work? They'd get just as published and sell just as many copies without it.
Huh, I'm a Steinbeck fan, which of his later works are you referring to? I think of "Grapes of Wrath" as his tome.
The worst example of this phenomenon that I've ever seen is *Atlas Shrugged*. Rand, as I understand, was able at that point in her career to demand that editors keep their grubby paws off her masterpiece, and as a result a book that could have been a work of deep, dark, depraved genius is instead a bloated, self-indulgent monster.
What part of "Atlas Shrugged" would you have cut? The version of the story I heard was that Rand argued with the publisher about the edits they suggested, and actually convinced them they they would detract from the points she was making.
In the interest of fair disclosure, I really liked AS, reading it in one sitting after I had purchased it. Admittedly, I didn't get much else done that day... Come to think of it, I did the same thing with "The Stand", referenced above.
I'm somewhat amazed at the speeds with which people read here on ACX. I've been Atlas Shrugged twice in my life, and never managed to complete it either time. Because of the length. I've tried speed reading a couple of times, but I just end up missing important points, so I go back to reading at snail pace
Hah. Does sound like a particularly nasty form of shrugging off.
Agree about not reading 500+ pages books in one sitting. I get antsy reading anything longer than The Murderbot Diaries in one sitting.
I've never been able to read "Atlas Shrugged" not because of the length, but because any time I've dipped into it, I wanted to slap all the characters. There are books I've hate-read because even though I disliked the characters/setting, I wanted them all to get what was coming to them and wanted to see if the author would do that, but Rand's "heroes" and "heroine" are so dislikeable, I can't even do that.
That's completely separate from her political/philosophical point of view, which of course will have an effect on how her characters think and behave, but the characters as they stand are not appealing to me.
Yeah, I spent over 80 hours reading Atlas Shrugged. I even decided to write a summary of it, to spare people the trouble of reading so much. http://david.loyc.net/misc/Atlas-Shrugged-summary
> What part of "Atlas Shrugged" would you have cut?
For starters, about two thirds of the literally dozens of functionally identical monologues and speeches.
I'm okay with characters making speeches - for example, I love *Les Miserables*, which is full of them. But in LM it's *different* speeches from characters with different points of view, which aren't ours or the author's. In *Atlas Shrugged* it's always an authorial mouthpiece doing the same tedious rambling.
That's an interesting observation. Also why I love War and Peace, although it too has way too many monologues from the characters
I'd have cut most of John Galt's infamous speech, and really most of John Galt. The story is much better when he's not on stage, including the parts where he's an interesting and mysterious figure in the background. When he shows up, it's a disappointment - and I think a big part of that is the author falling in love with her darling. She's much better with, well, pretty much all of the other characters in that tale.
Amusing to me, as it was reading "The Speech" online that convinced me to immediately to the store and buy a copy of the book, which I then sat down and read straight through. :-P
I think that the critical thing to remember about Atlas Shrugged is that it's a BDSM romance novel disguised as a philosophical thriller. *50 Shades of Gold*, or some such.
There's one thing I'd like which would make Atlas Shrugged a little longer. What did John Galt and Fred Kinnan (the union leader) say to each other? The first time I read AS, I went back and forth over the pages because I thought I'd missed a section.
I've never read it, but if a novel's success is to be calculated in terms of devoted fans, she probably did something right.
I suppose there is probably an element in all these cases that people who really like the writer probably prefer a work that is a little longer and less edited than the mass of those who respect them.
I like long books. I feel like I'm getting my money's worth. I re-read Atlas Shrugged earlier this year. I liked it when I was in my early 20s, and I wondered if it would hold up. It's actually still not bad. Definitely a polemic, and I've grown out of a lot of the concepts, but it's not bad.
A much more egregious case would be the Wheel of Time, I think. It felt like Robert Jordan just gave up on editing at all once the series was selling well.
Yeah my two favorite examples will be Heinlein and Michener, "Double Star" is a beautiful tight Shakespearean tragedy/ romance. And "Tales of the South Pacific" a gem. They both got verbose with age. And yet I still enjoy the rambling tomes, and to be honest I mostly would like them to go on forever... I sometimes feel a little sad when I'm getting near the end of a book. "I need to slow down and savor this before it's over."
I liked Michener a lot when I was a teenager and had lots of time to read. _The Source_ still informs a lot of my thinking about culture.
Details?
I remember a couple of things from it fondly. One is the framing device-- there's a tel, a hill that's the result of layers of stuff people built in a place. Archaeologists dig a trench, and Michener writes a long chapter about people associated with an object from each era.
The other is a local family which is there for the whole extended timeline, and which converts to whichever religion is convenient.
It was the framing device that really did it for me, that metaphor for how culture accretes slowly over time. It helped me to connect the history I was reading to the current state of play.
Interesting essay. But I wish you had provided some links to Grant's studies — and some quotes from Foucault, too. I'm sure I can dig them out myself, but, at least in my case, laziness obscures my perception (I don't have time for another Internet rabbit hole right now).
I'm a fan of an alternative take, that power and wealth disincentivizes people to concern themselves with others. You start needing people less the more you can depend on your capital.
Re meetups - the NYC rationalist community has been having in-person meetups again for a few months now (I know there's been some people here who've expressed interest).
They're usually Tuesday nights, occasionally on other days or weekend events. Ongoing mailing list/details are here https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/overcomingbiasnyc
We're not very good at posting weekly meetups to LessWrong, but this week's meetup and a few example past meetups are visible here: https://www.lesswrong.com/groups/4ee8NedvMNvoSitzj
Just note you're coming from the ACX open thread in the mailing list "application" box and I'll accept you. I promise we're not intimidating and you're all welcome, we're just bad about making the join process more welcoming and clear that we don't have application standards and any real person vaguely familiar with the community is welcome.
Unfortunately I'm not sure there's anybody in the group who would do substantially more/better organizing work if we were offered money.
I use this site to sometimes mention my podcast. I hope people don't mind. Anyway the latest was on Sumo with Kenji Tierney (he has such a nice voice!) I found it really interesting - he went into the history and comes at it as an anthropologist. Was startled to find that when the Japanese wanted to impress Perry they put on a Sumo exhibition (which had the exact opposite effect that they wanted - naked men - how barbaric!) and Perry had some of his men black up and put on a minstrel show.
https://www.buzzsprout.com/207869/8916373
TL;DR: The FDA is 5X too worried about long term credibility
There's been a debate about how soon the FDA should fully approve the mRNA vaccines. Critics like Matthew Yglesias and Eric Topol argue that full approval could be very beneficial because it opens the door to more mandates and allows advertising. Defenders of the FDA say the critics aren't thinking about the long term. If safety issues emerge after full approval, the defenders claim, the credibility of the FDA would be shot for years, driving fewer vaccinations in the long term.
The FDA's concerns about long term credibility seems hand-wavy and non-quantitative, so I decided to do some some back-of-the-envelope math to see how much it actually matters. With some reasonable assumptions that are quite favorable to the FDA, I estimate that they are 5X too worried about long term credibility. Even after accounting for long term risk, faster approval could give us 40 million vaccinated person-years over the long term, which could save over 100,000 lives.
The crux of the issue is this: The FDA worries about the unlikely scenario where safety issues emerge after approval of the 2021 vaccine, driving long term vaccine reluctance. That's fair, but that's mostly true *regardless* of whether the 2021 vaccine got full approval or an EUA. More details in my post linked to below.
I encourage anyone to question any of my assumptions!
https://chris-said.io/2021/07/25/fda-and-vaccines/
The FDA is trying to be too clever by half. You can't tell the entire country that it's super, super important to get vaccinated, and then hedge your bets by claiming "we never really approved it" if something goes wrong. In the minds of the people, this vaccine has an official imprimatur, and the FDA should stop beating around the bush.
Is the *FDA* telling the entire country that it's super, super important to get vaccinated? Almost everything I've heard on that has been from the CDC, from elements of the executive branch above the FDA/CDC level, and from the usual range of non-governmental thinkfluencers. Maybe I've missed the FDA's push in all the noise, which is quite possible, but it's also possible that they're just doing the same "just say no!" thing that's been working for them since 1957.
FWIW the FDA’s acting commissioner Dr. Janet Woodcock is quoted as saying, “Getting more of our population vaccinated is critical to moving forward and past this pandemic.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/21/briefing/covid-vaccines-fda-approval.html
What fraction of the people the FDA is trying to maintain credibility with know anything about this distinction?
The FDA is not supposed to say that it is super super important to get vaccinated. What they are saying with EUA that the vaccine has good data about efficacy and safety but we still want to know more. The importance of vaccination is between doctors and recipients. The FDA are like guardians between drug companies and public. The former wants to sell as many drugs as possible to people and the later wants to buy them as many as possible. The FDA is a filter that is supposed to let only good ones through. With the EUA the drug is allowed to be sold and administered but there is a label that information about the drug is not complete and may change. It reflects the true state of things but does not prevent getting the drug to those who want it.
Just be straight up about it. "This is new tech, we've examined it to the extent we can, we are pretty sure at this point that a major problem coming from left field is unlikely, though obviously we can't guarantee it." People who don't trust them still won't trust them, but they didn't before either.
Does the FDA still have any credibility left to lose, after e.g. the flip flop about the usefulness of masks?
Did the FDA have anything to do with that? Seems well outside their mandate, and I thought it was the CDC that was releasing face mask guidance.
Good question. As a mostly lay person, I wound up confused about who said what, but with even less confidence in all federal health bureaucrats.
If you're referring to Fauci, he was director of NIAID, subsidiary of NIH, which is separate from the CDC.
The FDA has been so horrible about so many things that I think The Zvi is right: abolish the FDA and we would save lives.
Is the FDA actually mandated to consider the long-term policy effects of its decisions as well as making a best-information estimate of whether a drug can be safely used? This would seem highly contradictory in terms of purpose, and importantly seems to involve a regulatory agency taking a political decision (do we do this thing if the consequences might be X?). If the FDA is expected to take decisions on behalf of the executive and Congress (who should be making federal political decisions) then that might explain a lot of its issues. It would certainly explain risk aversion around vaccines as a bureaucratic response to risk is almost always to create an imperfect solution that doesn't commit to doing anything.
Institutional incentives and mandates are very different motives, with nearly-identical outcomes.
Yes, but if the FDA is making decisions due to incentives that are not formally mandated why is this politically acceptable?
There's a book that I often recommend on how bureaucracies work, fittingly named "Bureaucracy," by James Q. Wilson. Without getting into the details, I don't think it makes sense to talk about monitoring or rejecting incentives for decisions, since it's not visible, and can't be challenged in a way that's useful. What they can do instead to assert more control is mandate stricter processes for decision making - which is a complete disaster, and created the current mess. So it seems that more oversight isn't going to fix this - to address the problem, we'd need to change the incentives for the organization, and for the leaders and workers at the FDA.
As someone whose paycheck is based on occupying a bureaucratic role, I'd agree with that point, but I'd still emphasise that the responsibility for the mess is not in general the bureaucrats' (excepting any empire builders or activists) but the politicians who happily let the FDA and it's many equivalents make political decisions for them.
...or the public's, for demanding types of bureaucratic control and conflicting incentives that make this type of conflict nearly inevitable, or the bureaucrats, for being unwilling to buck their described mandates to do the best thing at some risk to their careers, or...
In fact, moral mazes are the way they are because that is the nature of the type of system we build, not really because of any individual or group.
Humans exist in a universe with millions of conflicting incentives and costs and benefits and superstitions and errors. Not only that but each of those things changes from moment to moment ... and person to person.
Maybe once size fits all bureaucratic solutions with perverse feedback loops is doomed to fail. We should look for decentralized solutions: individual liberty, Constitutionally Limited Republic.
The Constitution isn't perfect, but it's better than what we have now.
You seem to be assuming that making vaccination mandatory is a good thing. IMO once everyone who wants a vaccine can get it, coercive measures against COVID are no longer justified. To vaccinated people, COVID is not riskless, but it's no longer an exceptionally dangerous disease that justifies exceptional measures.
Please remember that "everyone" includes kids!
Because currently we have a situation where most adults are vaccinated, there will be strong pressure to drop all precautions, but vaccines for kids are not available yet... so the likely outcome is my child getting covid because some classmate's antivaxer parents will do the most dangerous things just to demonstrate that they can.
After the kids are vaccinated, let the natural selection act on the antivaxers.
Yes, but COVID is currently not particularly dangerous to kids. Less so than flu in general is my understanding, at least in early years.
For most of them, not all of them, and those of us who are parents do not know which bin our kids will fall into if infected. I'm not going to do _everything_ I possibly can to keep my son from getting infected (if, indeed, he hasn't been already, none of us have been regularly testing) but I would like to use all reasonable measures to keep him healthy.
Incidentally, to the extent that practices other than the vaccine like masking & hand washing reduce the chances of COVID transmission, they are proportionately more effective against the flu, to the extent that positive flu tests in the US dropped by two orders of magnitude this past winter. I wrote about this in the comments on Scott's rather labored Les Mis parody.
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/verses-written-on-the-occasion-of/comments#comment-1838131
"to the extent that positive flu tests in the US dropped by two orders of magnitude this past winter"
Heh, what's the opposite of "I revise & extend my remarks"? I put this better the first time. We can't parse how much of this reduction in flu transmission stems from distancing, which we won't and shouldn't maintain in such a stringent fashion, and masks & handwashing, which are damn near a free lunch, but I would like to find out.
Wearing masks indoor, every winter, every year, is far from a free lunch for most people.
The flu isn't dangerous "For most of them, not all of them, and those of us who are parents do not know which bin our kids will fall into if infected. "
I believe more people have died from the Covid vaccine than children have died from Covid.
Will you be mandating flu vaccines because the numbers of children dying from each are about the same.
Credo enim magis populus mortuus a Vaccinum Covid filios et mortuus est Covid.
No, just doesn't have the same ring to it. Gonna need a citation.
What matters is that COVID's risk to children is low enough that we don't usually support intrusive measures to prevent risks this small. (A statistic I've found: 340 minors in the US have died from COVID in 2020 and 2021, while 51213 minors died in total during the same period. https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/covid_weekly/index.htm#SexAndAge Do you pay proportionate attention to all other causes of death?)
This isn't changed if the risk is actually large to a very small fraction of children. Let's say that 0.002% of the children who catch COVID die. That could be because any child who catches it has a 0.002% probability of dying. Or it could be because 0.01% of the children have a 10% probability of dying, and 99.99% have a 0.001% probability of dying. In the latter case, not all children have a low risk; but on aggregate, the risk to children is the same as in the former case, and no more intrusive measures are justified than in the former case.
"IMO once everyone who wants a vaccine can get it, coercive measures against COVID are no longer justified."
That would definitely be true if the vaccine gave perfect immunity with no chance of breakthrough infection. But if it's like drunk driving, where the person who is doing it bears most, but *not all*, of the risk, then it's reasonable that some amount of coercive measures be employed. (It depends on just how big that fraction of risk that others bear is - is it more like drunk driving, or like second hand smoke, or like something else?)
All sorts of diseases carry some risk to others, the flu being the most obvious parallel but we don't use similar measures against them.
Lockdowns, curfews, limits on gatherings are exceptional restrictions on liberty; so is the mandatory vaccination of adults (whether literally compulsory, or required for ordinary activities like going to a restaurant). I'm not one of those who categorically say that a disease like COVID can't justify extraordinary measures. However, only an especially dangerous disease justifies exceptional measures, a mild or moderately severe respiratory infection doesn't—in my opinion, and pretty much everyone's, prior to COVID. And that COVID was an exceptionally dangerous infection prior to vaccination doesn't mean we should continue treating it as exceptionally important to prevent even after the vaccination campaign is mostly complete.
This sounds a lot more like they had a position (don't approve) and came up with arguments to defend it. I don't think they actually care one iota about long term credibility, I think they care about not having to do anything outside of what the rules-as-written say to do.
> Assuming that 0.3% of unvaccinated people will die each year because they are not vaccinated
How is this calculated? What does it assume about what fraction of the unvaccinated people will catch COVID each year, and on what basis? What does it assume about the age distribution of the unvaccinated people? What does it assume about the fraction of unvaccinated people who have already got COVID, and about how much a previous infection protects against new infection (specifically, a fatal one)?
It's a rough average of the age-segmented infection fatality rates in this paper.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7721859/
All your questions are valid, but I'd wager my estimate is accurate within 0.5x and 2.0x, and also not critical to the main conclusion of the post, which is presented in units of vaccinated person-days.
You seem to be assuming that every unvaccinated person will be infected with COVID, and then infected *again* every year, and that each of these subsequent infections will be as deadly as the first. Or do I misunderstand what you mean by "0.3% will die each year"?
Because if that is what you mean, then no.
That's a good point. I've shaved it down to 0.2% based on the reinfection dynamics you mentioned, and because older people are more likely to be vaccinated, as Clive F mentioned below.
Your comment makes me realize something else though. To the extent that previous infection will protect the population in coming years, the long term (as well as concerns about long-term credibility) becomes somewhat less important. Not a claim I'd hang my hat on, but still interesting to think about.
If I'm remembering what I've read about the Spanish flu rightly, it was an unusual disease in that it affected young people much more strongly than old people, and that the best theory to explain this is that a previous strain of flu had been similar enough to the Spanish flu strain that elderly people's immune systems had a good chance to recognize and fight off the more virulent strain more effectively.
The dynamics of reinfection are, to my mind, one of the most interesting questions about COVID-19. I'm not sure how comparable coronaviruses and flu viruses are in terms of how much the underlying pathogen changes over the course of a given year or how well immunity to one strain confers immunity to related strains. COVID will become a manageable disease, but are we talking more like tetanus, where the vaccine is just something you get every 5 to 10 years and you're fine, or like the flu, where pharmaceutical companies are making their best guess on each year's edition which in turn affects the load that hospitals & clinics have to carry that winter, or something else entirely?
This might interest you:
https://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/13/health/13aspirin.html
I don't think you can just average the age-segmented rates: you'd need to account for the fact that those most at risk are most inclined to get vaccinated.
So in the UK we see vaccination rates above 90% for those most at risk (age >60), and down around 30-50% for younger, less at risk, groups (20-40). Although those will also likely go up over time, looking at the S-curves of growth it looks like the younger groups will top out around 60-70%.
You would also need to model the shrinking size of the uninfected population, as more people get it (and get natural immunity) but don't die. You may be doing this already, but it wasn't clear in your post.
I suppose over time we might also see different breakthrough rates of infection in those already vaccinated, but that isn't evident yet.
that's not just inclination, that's the fact that old people have been able to get the vaccine for longer. Many 20somethings haven't had a chance to get their second vaccine yet.
Given the aducanumab debacle, the FDA has no credibility left to lose (at least in my view).
From another discussion I've seen on DSL or ACX, the aducanumab case isn't that clear. The FDA is supposed to decide based on safety relative to the benefit. Aducanumab has likely little to no benefit, but it is also very safe, so they approved it. The issue is that once it's approved, Medicare probably has to pay for it if a doctor prescribes it.
Reasonably it should be a separate decision whether a drug is legal to buy at all* (which should only depend on being safe in relation to the expected benefits) and whether insurers are expected to pay for it (which should also depend on costs-to-benefits); just because there is a low chance it's effective it shouldn't be illegal to buy if you have all the money to burn. (All of this is what others have said in that discussion; I'm not all that familiar with the American healthcare system.)
*: or not strongly advised against, for libertarians
Approving the vaccines faster *because it is politically or socially convenient* is exactly the kind of thing which the FDA should never do. That way lies disaster, this would hardly be the first or last time approval or non-approval would have powerful social effects, and if the FDA were to make decisions based on that criteria, it would just open the floodgates to massive lobbying and political pressure, and the organization would be debased and forced into service to grubby tribalism in the way the Supreme Court has been over the past 50 years.
So far as I can tell, they are applying the same criteria for ultimate approval they use for any other vaccine -- which takes years, in general. That's exactly what they should do.
And audhelm was politically convenient!
I doubt that approval had anything to do with political convenience. I think it was driven by the fact that there are *no* effective treatments for Alzheimer's at all, and they probably hoped it would turn out better than nothing, if only by some tiny amount that wasn't obvious in the trials. That is, I doubt it would have been approved had there been any existing standard of care.
That doesn't mean it was the right decision, of course, but I think the forces at work here had much more to do with the (lack of) existing treatment regime than political considerations.
Yeah, I misspoke. Audhelm wasn’t politically convenient. It might have been partially by corruption or donors or because the fda higher ups were good friends with the company combined with that though
Reading an article about it, I don't think it was politically convenient and the decision seems to have caused upheaval in the FDA itself, as well as the drug company doing it best - by slapping a huge price on the treatment - to make sure that only a tiny set of potential patients will ever get it.
So I suppose the cynical view is that this is not about Alzheimer's (since even if the drug is useless, the patients are elderly and likely to die soon anyway, so no real bad effects there) but it does set a precedent about "Accelerated Approval" that perhaps some within the FDA would like to happen, given the amount of complaints about "why don't the FDA permit drugs approved in Europe to be prescribed here? why do they make drug companies carry out such long and expensive tests? why can't people decide for themselves if they want to try a new drug?".
https://www.pharmaceutical-technology.com/analysis/aducanumab-alzheimers-drug/
"In the wake of the drug’s approval, three members of the FDA’s advisory committee resigned from their posts, with one writing in his resignation letter that the FDA’s authorisation “made a mockery of the committee’s consultative process”. Back in November, the advisory panel voted almost unanimously against the approval of aducanumab, known commercially as Aduhelm, with ten voting against, one abstaining and none voting in favour.
...As well as concerns about aducanumab’s efficacy, Biogen has come under fire for the steep price attached to the new treatment. While drug pricing watchdog ICER determined that a fair cost for a therapy with such limited evidence of efficacy would fall between $2,500 and $8,300, Biogen has slapped an eye-watering $56,000-per-year price tag on the drug.
ICER said in a statement: “Our report notes that only a hypothetical drug that halts dementia entirely would merit this pricing level. The evidence on aducanumab suggests that, at best, the drug is not nearly this effective.
“At this price the drug maker would stand to receive well in excess of $50bn per year even while waiting for evidence to confirm that patients receive actual benefits from treatment.”
Even advocates for the drug have slammed Biogen over the drug’s price. The Alzheimer’s Association called the cost “simply unacceptable”, and said it “will pose an insurmountable barrier to access, it complicates and jeopardises sustainable access to this treatment, and may further deepen issues of health equity”."
An insurmountable barrier to access is only relevant to a drug that works, which this probably doesn't.
What about approving the vaccines faster *because it is good for public health*?
That falls under "socially convenient," so no, they should not do that either. The FDA has no mandate to ponder appropriate public health measures, their job is (or should be) limited to saying whether Drug X works or doesn't work. The question of whether Drug X should be mandated, optional, or forbidden is a question for regulators at (in my opinion, and notwithstanding Raich v. Gonzales) the state level.
To the extent there is any Federal agency with a mandate to recommend public health measures, that would be the CDC, and in general I don't think public health is primarily a Federal responsibility at all -- you'll note the Constitution is silent on this point -- and is properly within the ambit of state and sometimes local government.
I'm not a fan of protean Federal agencies where whichever is convenient at the moment is imbued with the full powers of government. I like having strict and precisely-defined missions for Federal agencies and having them stay within those missions. If the missions need to be changed -- if the voting public wants FEMA and the FDA to turn into first responders, say -- then the right thing to do is for Congress to rewrite their enabling legislation, after a considerable open debate and preferably the intervention of an election or two so the voters can give their opinion, too.
What Carl says, mostly. The FDA has sixty years of history not approving drugs faster because it is good for public health, and they clearly don't see it as being their job to approve drugs faster because it's good for public health. And if they are in any way wrong about that, Congress has had sixty years to change the law making it clear what the FDA is supposed to be doing.
The FDA's job is to classify drugs, vaccines, etc, as one of "not shown to be safe and effective", "probably effective and not horribly dangerous", and "proven effective and very very very safe", according to objective criteria. I'd prefer they have a broader range of options to chose from, but I think that would be up to Congress. Maybe I'd prefer they quietly take a "very" or two off that last option on their own initiative.
But, within the options allowed to them by law, they have properly given Pfizer, Moderna, and J&J the "probably effective and not horribly dangerous" Emergency Use Authorization and are holding back on the full "proven effective and very (very very) safe" Approval until they have the usual amount of data for that.
What to do with a vaccine that has only, and properly, an Emergency Use Authorization, is for the CDC and Congress and the various State governments to decide.
It’s not “worry about long term credibility” lmao. It’s their process, and about the power of people involved.
If it was about credibility, they wouldn’t have approved audhelm. Approval vs emergency approval will not affect their long term credibility at all for the vaccine seeing as most who are gonna take it have.
Since you've said it three times now: for the record, the trade name of aducanumab is spelled "Aduhelm".
I’m not sure if it’s because i misspelled it before - I think that’s why, can’t imagine why else - but this phone is autocorrecting aduhelm to audhelm
FDA is like police. They don't care about their credibility because you have to obey them regardless. Nevertheless, I think they dropped the ball with aducanumab because they approved it with expectation that it may prove more useful in the future. It is not their mandate to be involved in issues like that. It is like police not arresting young criminals because they believe that they may grow up and stop doing crime. Surely, sometimes jailing young offenders makes them only worse. But you still have to arrest them and let the courts decide what punishment or not they deserve.
The FDA deeply cares about credibility. It’s how they got power in the first place.
https://willyreads.substack.com/p/fda-lessons-learned
That substack has great reviews of books about the FDA for learning more.
Like all governmental organization FDA has its faults. And overreguation can be an issue. But there are too many shouting that FDA should be abolished without suggesting viable alternative.
I’m not ... criticizing the FDA here, the Aduhelm approval was clearly against their reputational interests, so it’s not like that’s bad. And I agree abolishing the FDA without a direct replacement that carried out all its existing functions better, including strictly regulating drugs and medical snake oil, is very very bad. And people who call for the abolition of the FDA do not ever come even close to a way to do that, and abolishing the FDA without that would harm millions of people and likely kill thousands. I didn’t mention overregularion though? Just that the FDA manages its reputation and political situation closely and in everything it does, and that’s integral to understanding how it came to be and what it is. I mean it wouldn’t have been founded without reputation, wouldn’t have had its scope expanded without reputation, would not now be the one of the most powerful regulatory agencies in America without its reputation and political maneuvering, etc.
Please do read https://willyreads.substack.com/p/fda-lessons-learned https://willyreads.substack.com/p/a-history-of-the-fda and every other book review on that substack it’s so good
If the FDA approved Aduhelm against their reputation interests, it means they care less about their reputation than we think. Of course, no one is absolute immune to bad reputation but I don't think that their decisions are particularly influenced by reputational risk. Reputation comes from doing their job honestly. The head of the FDA may be influenced by political decisions which means that their reputation among politicians is more important than among common people.
I just read the review of A history of the FDA and it's really interesting. Mostly it appears that FDA was blamed from everything but they did mostly right. Some genuine concerns about FDA policies (like making plan B prescription only) were overshadowed but populistic movements that did not understand science. The story about Laetril is so telling. It is not that FDA had a clear opinion about Latertil. It didn't grant IND because those people were quacks and could have harmed many people unnecessarily even during clinical trials.
They always had a chance to get their act together, resubmit the application and do useful studies. IND was later granted not without political interreference but there is always a gray area in controversial issues. The fact that Laetrile failed tells more about the activist groups than the FDA.
It seems that the FDA is the most science based authority that has to fight against all other groups.
Didn't they get power via Congress passing a law that "FDA has power"?
I suppose if they lose credibility Congress might repeal that law. (Or, more realistically, just weaken it.)
Their power was initialted, enforced, expanded, and cemented by ... reputation. What makes congress pass such laws? What makes competing agencies and higher ups willing to grant power? What makes people willing to continue the agencies? What makes their agency not get overtaken? Reputation!
>It is like police not arresting young criminals because they believe that they may grow up and stop doing crime. Surely, sometimes jailing young offenders makes them only worse. But you still have to arrest them and let the courts decide what punishment or not they deserve.
At least at the federal level in the US, police and prosecutors do actually have that discretion. A judge cannot force the executive to bring a criminal case against someone.
(There is a good argument that prosecutorial discretion is too broad and ought to have more checks, but is =/= ought.)
Yes, but my point is that if someone does a serious crime and police does not arrest the offender, it will not look good. It is as if they openly encouraging and tolerating crime. The discretion sometimes is a good thing because sometimes crime is not crime, for example, using drugs is a crime in certain countries but should not be. Clearly, it was not meant to be an example of this.
The police also care about their reputation lol
Keep in mind that in most US jurisdictions, the DA is but a glorified politician.
Prosecuting bankers and jailing the wayward offspring of US Senators without fear or favor is not the way to win powerful friends who can boost your career, nor does it do much to assuage Solid Citizens' fears that you are protecting them from criminal elements.
Ever read "Dorm Room Dealers", or "why is it that rich college kids can sell dope with impunity and you can't?"?
EUA is specifically intended to facilitate monitoring and collection of data about possible side effects. It includes greater duty to report side effects. Other than that for doctors it makes no difference because they can legally prescribe and administer the drug. Maybe it has some subtle differences for insurers but I haven't see any issues with vaccines so far.
I don't see the reason to change the classification just because some antivax interpret that the EUA means it is a highly unreliable drug. They say EUA means experimental. It is just arguing about semantics because in a way all drugs are experimental. You never know what reaction a person will have and what will be the side effects.
Another issue I saw was that vaccines cannot be made mandatory, e.g., in military etc. until they are fully registered. That's not the problem of the FDA at all. They are only to ensure the safety and efficacy and EUA is appropriate when this data is somewhat lacking. It has no say whether the use of a drug should be made mandatory (e.g., for violent schizophrenics who have court ordered mandatory treatment etc.). If the government considers that the use of vaccine is so important and beneficial despite EUA status, they can mandate it without passing the responsibility to the FDA. In the given circumstances the FDA clearly intended the vaccine to be widely used practically by every adult. So, why not give it to all military people too, with rare exception when the doctor may not recommend getting vaccine to a particular individual.
I got AZ and honestly I am a little happier about getting jabbed with a genetically engineered virus that is at least a real virus, than having my RNA messaging hacked. Even though AZ has known nasty (if rare) side effects. Survivor's bias, maybe - I didn't get the side effects other than standard vaccination ones. But I'd sooner get injected with mRNA than with Aduhelm, and the FDA okayed that!
A curious preference, as the AZ vax has the *DNA* for the spike protein inside it, and (successfully integrated) viral DNA has a much better chance of having some long-term effects on cells than mRNA, which is normally degraded so quickly (minutes) that the BioNTech and Moderna crews had to make some funky modifications to it to make it last a bit longer.
Anyway, once the DNA is inserted into your genome, it gets translated to mRNA and hacks your protein synthesis pathways in the same way as the mRNA vaccines.
As I have studied a little bit of immunology at university, I can say that it is extremely complicated. It is the most complicated part of human organism and we are nowhere near to understand or control it. We are lucky that the vaccines work in a way that Jenner was lucky that his original cowpox virus vaccine was effective for smallpox and was not dangerous to humans. It actually is a quite rare coincidence that such virus that could be found and directly used for vaccinations exists.
We have pushed anti-covid vaccines to the limit, any stronger side effects and they could not be used. Make them a little bit weaker and they will not be efficient enough. It is only our luck that they happened to be just good enough and in fact researchers had many tries and many vaccines didn't pass this threshold.
This is something that researchers, regulators, health authorities and physicians realize and have to make complicated decisions to balance efficiency with potential side effects. The public mostly don't realize that they are hard decisions because we don't want to scare them away from vaccinations. People mostly think – vaccines, how wonderful, it's so easy, just go and get jabbed and don't worry about side effects, the risk is insignificant. Your individual risk is indeed very low but at the population level professionals see balancing on a razor's edge and pray that they work as hoped.
I'll be away in my hometown during September, but in October why not an open air meeting in Amsterdam during a good weather day in a nice park?
I have been noodling for awhile now on creative ways to reduce emissions from air travel. Here's a fun one: what if we had electric towplanes tow jet aircraft off the ground as a present-day towplane does a glider, and the jet engines kicked in only after takeoff?
Advantages:
-- An electric towplane might be more feasible than a medium/long-range electric passenger plane, because all it needs to do is get the towed plane off the ground, unhook the tow cable, and land again before recharging, so the batteries required would be relatively small.
-- Besides the fuel and emissions savings from not having to use jet engines for takeoff, it would also reduce noise and air pollution around airports.
-- Retrofitting existing planes to be towed might be cheaper than replacing them.
Possible obstacles:
-- A towed takeoff might be too rough and/or too unreliable compared to a powered takeoff.
-- Existing tow cable materials might not be strong enough to take the load of a large passenger jet.
-- Existing airframes of passenger jets might not withstand being towed into the air, and retrofitting them might be infeasible.
-- The towing process might be so aerodynamically inefficient as to cancel out the energy savings. (Disclaimer: I know next to nothing about aerodynamics or aircraft engineering).
What else am I missing?
This may be a stupid question, but if an electric engine is capable of getting both the towplane and the passenger plane off the ground, why not just put the electric engine in the passenger plane and cut out the middle-plane?
Batteries and cost of retrofitting/replacing existing fleets.
Energy density I would say. The best batteries technology we have, lithium ion, can at best achieve 1/50th of the energy per unit weight that kerosene can (according to figured from wikipedia, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_density). The OP's proposal is to use small batteries that would likely be drained after take-off, so the remainder of the journey is still done by the conventional jet engines of the towed plane.
It's just not possible to have a long range electric plane given current battery technology. You might say that you have access to the sun (at least during daytime) and there was indeed an experimental plane, the Solar Impulse, that went round the world on solar panels and batteries but it was considered an impressive feat, and only had a crew of two.
Of course. Since Nicholas suggested using the towplane for takeoff, I figured the same could be done with an electric engine, not to replace the jet engine, but to supplement it. A hybrid plane, as it were.
Just throwing this out there in case it inspires any better ideas, but if there was enough energy cost of hauling the batteries all the way up to cruise altitude (or along for the ride) you could maybe eject discarged battery packs inflight and have them glide themselves down to the nearest depot for reuse.
If the batteries are heavy enough to need ejecting, maybe it's a better idea just to have the plane hooked up to an extremely long power cable that drops off and retracts once the plane has gained sufficient speed for takeoff. Or maybe an electric launch rail?
I thought of the cable also, and the wireless variation where you use a microwave beam and rectenna. My guess is the cable required for all that power is too heavy and the beam too hard to direct precisely and too damaging if you don't.
Do we know that the takeoff phase of flight is responsible for so many more emissions than other phases that a complex and expensive multi-stage takeoff is a good next step to consider? I'm skeptical as planes aren't rockets, but would be interested in seeing some data.
I found a slide deck here: http://www.icrat.org/icrat/seminarContent/Author/Yashovardhan%20SushilChati842/PRESENTATION-642-cfp-Chati.pdf
...that, from eyeballing some charts, suggests that emissions from other phases would dwarf those from takeoff. It also seems to suggest that the cruise phase is on average so much longer than the takeoff and climbout phases (11x longer in the chart on page 11, which may be from a single flight rather than an average) that takeoff might not be the low hanging fruit even though it uses the highest thrust setting (per page 12, 100% during takeoff roll compared to 30% during approach).
Good point. I still think takeoff likely has disproportionate local effects on noise and air quality right by the airport, but the nonlocal effects like CO2 may not be so disproportionate.
For local effects, one thing that surprised me from that slide deck was the number of minutes per flight the planes spent sitting around idling with their engines on. That seems like a problem that could be fixed with better logistics software (if the impact turned out to be big enough to prioritize).
I'm guessing that a jet aircraft (unlike a car) at idle uses a fairly small amount of fuel, though?
Good question!
Looking the ICAO Aircraft Engine Emissions Dataset, which seems to be a big excel spreadsheet downloaded from https://www.easa.europa.eu/domains/environment/icao-aircraft-engine-emissions-databank, the relevant columns seem to be the four columns BZ, CA, CB, and CC (fuel flow in kilograms per second for engines at takeoff, climbout, approach and idle settings respectively) along with columns Q, R, S and T (hydrocarbon emission index in grams per kilogram for the engine at takeoff, climbout, approach and idle).
Looking at a couple of the biggest engines, it looks like idle is less efficient than higher settings (emitting in some cases over 100x more unburnt fuel at idle than at T/O setting) yet still burns a significant amount of fuel (for one big engine, 3 times as much at approach as at idle, and about 4x as much at takeoff as at approach).
(The earlier link I posted, to the slide deck, was based on sampling FDR data rather than the ICAO data set -- interestingly, the authors found that ICAO's data tend to slightly overestimate time-in-phase and fuel consumption.)
It is mostly fixed by on-the-ground electric tows and plugging into the airport electric grid.
Some airports don't have the tows, and some airlines don't like paying stand charges. Beyond that, logistically, its a 'solved' problem.
Turbofan engines are generally designed to operate optimally during cruise, then sized up to provide enough power during takeoff & climb; given that fuel is the primary variable cost to airlines, this is clear evidence that fuel consumption (and thereby emissions) is far more affected by cruising than transitions.
You're mostly missing that modern airplanes are busses. Whatever replacements/improvement companies do it will have to be about as scalable and convenient.
Towing might be ok on paper or in a proof of concept setting. But just imagine somebody telling drivers they need a tower to start the car. The benefits would have to be quite extreme for any driver (or airplane company) to consider it.
I'd point out airplanes already need a tower's permission to start, so requiring normal use of a tow-er might not be much of a change, and it would allow for an excellent gag in a reboot of Airplane!
Here's some low hanging fruit being picked. Regional airports should increase in value.
https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.ainonline.com/aviation-news/air-transport/2020-09-23/heart-unveils-electric-propulsion-system-es-19-airliner%3famp
Off the top of my head, something with enough "oomph" to tow a jet and get it airborne would probably be as heavy on emissions as the jet itself. Gliders are (by comparison) made out of tissue-paper and are very light and thus easy to get off the ground. A jet plane full of passengers, luggage and so forth?
The thought is that it would be electric, and the original energy may come from clean(er) sources, or generated in more remote areas. Thus less pollution and less carbon.
I'm not sold on the idea because it adds a lot of extra complexity. Planes aren't towable from any point of view - structural, aerodynamic, control etc.
I do think electric is the future, because it clearly is. But it will come in time, as battery density and cost improve, and slow, because airplanes are built with very long lifespans in mind. We're seeing now regulations banning short flights due to environmental concerns. Allowing them for electric or even hybrid planes would be a win-win-win situation (third win being positive externalities from improving electric plane tech).
On a sidenote, two-man gliders are really fun to fly. You should totally try it; in my area, a ticket costs about $200 (this pays for a 30-min flight, and an instructor who will teach you how to make the glider go where you want it to go).
And this.
https://www.designboom.com/technology/eviation-alice-all-electric-aircraft-07-19-2021/
Is air travel enough of a fraction of emissions to be worth dicking with?
Pre-pandemic, aircraft were responsible for less than 3% of greenhouse gas emissions. Is this really a problem that needs to be prioritized?
In that it if this was successfully implement it would presumably make flying cheaper (it's not till things look like they may reduce cost that industries adopt them), yes.
3% here, 1% there, 5% somewhere else; pretty soon you're talking about real ghg.
(a) As a only moderate simplification, jet engines are either on or off. If they're on, they're burning significant quantities of fuel. If they're off, you're not flying. As a consequence, you get relatively few gains from converting some of the energy required to climb from gas to electric because it represents such a small fraction of the fuel burned.
(b) Jet engines mostly make noise because they're moving air, not because of the combustion. So, changing the source of energy that is causing air to move isn't going to save you much (or really anything, although you might get some benefit on the margin from changing the design of the blades). Your standard 4-seater prob plane is much quieter than a jet not because of some magic with the engine, or some magic associated with jets, but because they're moving less air. If you want to get 378 tons to ascent 20,000+ feet, you need to move a lot of air. That means making a lot of noise.
Thanks, this is the domain knowledge I was looking for. :)
Noise is also a function of how fast you're moving the air; a 707 moving a smaller amount of air very fast (straight jets) is louder than a 747 moving a much larger amount of air only rather fast (high-bypass turbofans).
Indeed, you could make a pretty quiet jet if you built a really huge fan, like 30m across, and had the passenger compartment sit in the middle of this giant hoop, because you wouldn't have to accelerate that enormous mass of air very much to achieve the same change in momentum. Of course, you'd need some extraordinarily light materials to make that big a fan, and it would have some annoying gyroscopic stability issues that would make it a bit tricky to turn. Landing would also be somewhat tricky, but I suppose you could tilt it on enormous hinges and do VTOL.
I live under near University Hospital Galway, which runs the county helicopter ambulance. Jets? I wish. This thing shakes the house on a regular basis, and it's not moving so fast it will be over soon...
[Wow, just out of curiosity I googled University Hospital Galway since I mentioned it, and the Wikipedia is mostly a bunch of axe grinding about certain incidents. The reality is it's a hospital like any other.]
(In Ireland we have a free public health service, it's not that great but it's free. On balance I think that's good, though I haven't ever needed it much anyway. I'm not sure what is impelling me to add this. I suppose the reality is that I understand the staff are doing their best to fix people up with limited resources, but throwing more resources at the problem wouldn't fix it anyway.)
Non CO2 emissions are more damaging at altitude, so the benefits in reducing plane emissions may be skewed toward reducing in flight emissions rather than take off or landing emissions.
(Discussed here https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-49349566)
(A) A tow plane powerful enough to get an airliner plane off the ground and up to speed is going to be large and expensive.
(B) You almost certainly wouldn't be able to cost effectively retrofit existing planes because none of them are designed to be pulled around by the nose.
(C) Unless you have a carbon free source of electrical power, it's a mug's game anyway, and we don't.
There are so many reasons this wouldn't work, here are two I haven't seen mentioned yet:
1. Wake vortices would be a huge problem.
2. It is very likely to just be cheaper to continue as normal but pay extra for direct air capture offsets.
I fly gliders, where towing is common and I have to stress that it's really, really dangerous for the plane being towed and even more dangerous for the one doing the towing. It works for gliders because even if the rope needs to be cut at low altitude, the glider will almost instantly be in stable flight. This wouldn't work for existing airliners, which do not glide well. Even with the ability to cut the rope (and the tow pilot will kick you off without a moment's hesitation if you get too out of line), some of the more dangerous phenomena leading to tug upsets happen in just seconds.
And winch launches are even worse because if the rope breaks you're left not in a stable flying orientation and can easily stall.
There’s no energy savings here. You need the full energy you would have needed before or more. And Jet planes needs Het engines in order to take off. That’s where the major power, and energy is needed. Cruising above the weather is fairly energy efficient.
It's not about saving energy, it's about changing the source of the energy. If your towplane is powered from the electrical grid then you can launch your planes with solar power instead of fossil fuels.
The cost would be more energy as the towing machine has to lift both itself and the plane. Also it would have to be a big robust machine to lift a plane.
if it was possible to use batteries on a plane, it would be in flight not on takeoff where enormous power is needed.
I think a much more realistic (but still probably not feasible right now) idea would be to put electric or steam powered catapults on the runways, like they have on aircraft carriers. Presuming you could power the catapult from a clean energy source then you could reduce emissions slightly this way. Still I'd imagine for safety the plane would still spool up its engines - you'll notice airliners don't come back from full power until they're in a stable climb with the landing gear up.
I think you're only saving a tiny amount of fuel. It's not so much getting up to speed as it is getting up to altitude. An actual airline pilot could correct me, but based on my rough math from playing MS Flight Sim, you'll use between 5-20% of your fuel climbing up to altitude (depending on length of trip), and most of the rest cruising. Now, you make that up somewhat from the savings of flying high. Less drag, less fuel used.
Now if we had a big elevator to take the plane up to 35,000 feet. . . . .
Tethered balloons. When ready you hook your fully-loaded 747 to a truly enormous helium gasbag, which when released floats up to 50,000 feet. At that point you turn on the engines. If all the lights are green, the passengers put on safety belts and assume crash positions, the release mechanism tilts the plane into a 45 degree dive attitude, and the plane is released. The pilots pull out of the resulting steep dive as soon as they can without causing the passenger to black out or the wings to rip off. Assuming they can do it within 10,000 feet they then level out and begin the cruise part of the flight.
Meanwhile, a big electric motor powered by acres of PV panels (and about $1 million Tesla Powerwalls for night operations) winches the balloon back to the ground for another takeoff.
All airports should be on mountaintops!
Special bonus disadvantage: the tow plane has to come in and land again once it's done its job, so you've increased the traffic load on your runway by 50%.
Making good progress on my first game. I've finished writing the rough draft for the main dialog, just need to write the rest of it and make more progress in Godot. We're at about where I was when I abandoned the project in 2012 in terms of gameplay currently.
Almost there, now you're just Waiting For Godot.
I'm going
Good job. Keep on working. What kind of game are you making?
It's a puzzle game disguised as a shmup
Remember it's the gameplay that makes the game. Not the dialog.
Common opinion
Counterexample: Deus Ex. Though the gameplay was pretty good too, and if it had been actively bad that would have been a dealbreaker.
Planescape: Torment is another arguable counterexample. Still, it's generally true.
Alpha testing when? It's important to get feedback, and useful to spread motivation to complete across people that aren't just you. Also if you decide to cut it short it's nicer to cap off the project as 1 polished stage rather than N rough ones.
"would you go to an in-person indoors ACX meetup in ~September?"
Yes.
"Would you consider it irresponsible to hold one?"
No.
Modeling of each country's Delta waves are all over the place, but after it gets a country to herd immunity, it seems like in-person indoor meetups would be thoroughly appropriate.
That could very well happen first in Europe. The UK wave seems to be cresting (although I've heard a couple competing hypotheses, like a test shortage). They also have very high immunity levels, suggesting that the Delta burn through the remainder of the unvaccinated population would be quick.
The US has a much larger unvaccinated (and uninfected) portion of its population, so the Delta wave will probably be longer and worse. It seems like a good idea to go to (parts of) Europe.
I suggest you not count on herd immunity. Especially since B.1.617.2 seems to be making inroads on both the previously infected and on a greater percentage of the vaccinated than previous variants.
According to this paper, the serum neutralizing antibodies conferred SARS-CoV-2 only have a half-life of only 5 weeks. And CoVs are notorious for reinfecting people.
https://journals.plos.org/plospathogens/article?id=10.1371%2Fjournal.ppat.1009509
Are you referring to me or to Yewdell? Either way, if you've got reasoned argument to present with some links to back up your position I'd be willing to listen. But I stopped believing in the Herd Immunity Fairy during the 3rd quarter of 2020 when wimpy little variants from the B lineage with only the B614D mutations created new surges where the models predicted the population should be at or near herd immunity with seropositive rates from previous infections. Remember, back then "experts" like Anders Tegnell were claiming a ~50 percent seropositive rate would create herd immunity (which is what they'd seen with recent flu viruses). Well, Anders was wrong, and Sweden went through a second higher surge.
I don't think your position is supported by evidence. The reinfection rate seems super low. Everything I've read is that antibodies are super long-lasting as well as memory T-cells and so on. I read some things early about antibodies fading but it turned out they were short-term antibodies and the long-term ones last for months and months.
There's some data coming out of Israel that shows the antibody titers from Pfizer drop off quickly after 3 months, and they drop by about 80 percent by 6 months (!). I haven't seen the original study, only a scary summary. And it's significantly contradictory to some of other studies I've read. But I'm not going to discount it until I look at the methodology and the numbers. Also, of course, which sort of antibodies are they talking about?
I've read somewhere that antibody levels normally quickly decrease for a while, and then stabilize, or continue to decrease much more slowly over the years. If this is correct, then a half-life of 5 weeks shouldn't be interpreted such that it then continues to halve every 5 weeks.
You'll probably have a low level of residual antibodies for a year or even two, but the vaccines push those to a much higher level, that will (presumably) stay with you longer — the data is still coming in. Best not to assume being infected with 2019-nCoV, or even B.1.1.7 will offer much protection going forward. And this seems to be the way of CoVs.
That reminds me of a Mulla Nasrudin story. I've heard several versions, but because of its setting it must be of modern instead of medieval vintage. It goes like this...
The management of a factory in Ankara called a mandatory meeting that all the employees were required to attend. This caused much consternation among the workforce, because mandatory meetings were generally a sign that there was bad news coming down the line. With much grumbling and whispering, all the employees gathered. Their union leader, Mulla Nasrudin shushed them all, "Quiet! I need to listen carefully to what management has to say, so I can form our bargaining stance."
When the employees were finally silent, the managing director stepped up to the podium and began to speak. "My friends," he said, "I have a wonderful announcement. From a month hence, the company is going to install robots on the production lines..."
The entire audience gasped...
"...and henceforth, all the labor will be carried out by machines. This will mean that the work we be done perfectly, more efficiently, and it will up our production rate by 200 percent! This will make the entire company more profitable!"
"What about the workers?" shouted Mulla Nasrudin.
"There's no cause for alarm," the general manager assured them. "You will be paid as usual with annual cost of living increases. And your healthcare plans and retirement plans will continue to be funded. All you will have to do is come in every Friday and pick up your pay checks." The general manager was beaming at his astounded audience.
Mulla Nasrudin stood up and addressed the general manager. "This is an outrage! You insist we come in *every* Friday to pick up our checks?!"
Back in the early days, everyone laughed at the concept of herd immunity. And they were right! But more recently it became PC to talk about it.
What's actually happening is that now that vaccines are available for the vulnerable and/or winning, we're going to let it turn into an endemic disease. Hopefully this will work well. But if people are not dying in droves, it won't be because of herd immunity, but because of herd semi-immunity. People, especially and increasingly the young, will have had some contact with the virus, and any new infections they get won't kill them and will leave them more immune than they were before.
I was baffled by 'winning' for a while myself. Am I turning into Trump? Would that be good or bad? But on due consideration, I'm pretty sure I meant 'willing'.
Oh my, oh my, OH MY! I'm shocked at how people are misremebering the history of this pandemic. Anders Tegnell of Sweden latched on to herd immunity as solution for Sweden almost immediately (circa March 2020) — and it didn't work out as well as he claimed it would — but I still haven't heard him admit he was wrong. And around the same time a bunch of right-wing oriented immunologists and MDs issued The Great Barrington Declaration that advocated letting the epidemic take it's course and not to mask or lock down. And right-wing think tanks like the Hoover Institute had various medical shills hit the news talk circuit to lobby against masks and lockdowns, and to advocate for herd immunity.
BTW at that time no one argued that theory of herd immunity was wrong, but a lot of immunologists and epidemiologist pointed it out that it was a stupid idea, because under the best case scenarios, herd immunity wouldn't kick in until 60-70% of any given population was infected — meaning people would continue to die at the high CFRs of the early epidemic (overall, 3 percent of those diagnosed died from COVID-19, until Drs learned how to treat it). By August/September 2020 it was clear to some experts that the pattern of outbreaks weren't reflecting the classic herd immunity scenarios described in the epidemiological literature. Now that vaccination rates are pushing 50 percent in some places, people are starting to talk about herd immunity again, but that seems to be wishful thinking promoted by the gullible MSM or purposeful misinformation from the RWM or by experts who want to offer a light at the end of the tunnel.
Strange. Look at the death rates in the UK. COVID is endemic and everyone will get it (eventually), vaccinated or not, but it will be a mild disease for those with prior exposure or vaccination or youth.
Unfortunately, Coronaviruses as a group of pathogens haven't provided durable immunity in the past.
SARS-1 does, right?
@Deiseach would you be at all interested in having an email conversation with me? I'm a trans woman with I think a rare perspective and I'd like to talk about it. If so, email me at jmb3481@gmail.com
Thank you, but no. I prefer to keep all interactions with other people on social media public. If you wish to discuss anything you feel comfortable sharing in public, it might indeed be a good post to put up here for other people to participate in, if you feel it would illuminate the debate.
Not at all challenging you on this and it's totally your right, but I'm curious why you prefer public to private debate.
Ah, a good while ago I let something that began as "we all met online and had common interests and a great, fun time discussing particular things" turn into an offline friendship via email, except it wasn't really a friendship as it developed, and it petered out badly.
I learned the lesson from that: keep online stuff online, keep public acquaintanceship public. Going "hey, can we take this private?" is not generally something I feel comfortable with, because I feel expectations get set up; on my own behalf, I would certainly feel obligated to respond and interact long past any point where I'd lost interest, because it's not polite to suddenly blank someone.
And to be cynical and CYA about it, because nowadays it's all too easy for "I thought this was a private exchange" to suddenly be made public, with cherry-picked excerpts, by one of the parties and used as evidence that "Look, I told you all PurpleMeanie was wicked! Here be proof that they said one thing in public and another in private!"
I'm not casting any aspersions on Sovereigness and their intentions here, but it's in the self-protective interests of all parties to have any kind of touchy subject in a public forum where there are witnesses to who said what when.
dammit Substack give us a comment editing function!
Consider my recent exchange of views with jstr, who gave me an ultimatum that I couldn't accept because I was offline at the time and didn't see it until the next day, then when I didn't delete the comment that offended him in the thirty-minute window he demanded, he told me he was going to get Scott to ban me.
I ended up eating a minor ban over that. Now imagine we had conducted all that off-line in private emails exchanged. Imagine what he would claim I had or had not said to him.
Yeah.
Public is safer.
I agree -- in the modern political climate, private exchanges over controversial topics are marginally more dangerous than public ones; I say "marginally" because I think that public exchanges are already incredibly dangerous.
That said, from a purely selfish point of view, I'd love to read the @Sovereigness vs. @Deiseach debate. So, ladies, feel free to sacrifice your safety for my amusement ! Mwa ha ha !
I do think public is better, for a couple of other reasons:
(1) My opinions aren't very much different, so what I'd say here and what I'd say in private exchange with you wouldn't be too divergent
(2) Where they *would* diverge is that public forces a certain amount of circumspection on me (I know, looking at my ban record you wouldn't think so) but there are 'things what I think' that I would keep private and not say because "SodaDrinker would be very upset by this and I have no particular reason to insult SodaDrinker" (on the other hand, if we were engaging in public gloves-off full and frank exchange, that is a different matter because then I don't care about hurt feelings *IF* I believe what I am saying is true, not just to insult you)
(3) Some things I want to keep in the inside of my head and don't particularly want to share them either public or in private one-to-one
I'm with Deiseach on this one, for the reasons she gave and also because it compromises your public expressions of opinion if you mix them with your private interactions. The former are supposed to be wisdom or as it may be insanity for the ages, the latter are at most about how you learned that wisdom, and may well be more personal.
And a theoretical debate by its nature is a public event.
Also, if a debate started in a public forum, what is the point in taking it private? Is the argument to be made incapable of standing on its own feet? Is it too personal (if so, I think we are all accepting of any necessary anonymisation).
I do not in general accept 'let's take it to email' offers. I interpret them largely as an attempt to silence me. I can accept it may be legitimate on super technical issues where two renowned experts argue on whether a particular stamp cutting machine could have cut a particular stamp - but that is not the usual circumstance.
I'm a trans person with a boring and almost universally unpopular perspective and I'm happy to publicly discuss whatever you want.
No thanks. This is the wrong format for a targeted discussion / double crux kinda deal. Id more than happily agree to have the conversation be published/posted publicly afterward, but I don't want to have it through the comment section text processor with interruptions in real-time.
Okay, thank you for the offer, and I hope you find someone else on here who is amenable to a private discussion.
Hell, even I might be amenable to a private discussion on some kinda topic. But on transgender issues, I might not be conservative enough to make it interesting (I'm still conservative by today's standards, mind you). Also, I'm a nobody from nowhere, so discussing anything with me is kind of a waste of time...
If your main problem's the ACX UI (which I totally sympathize with), would you be amenable to another public venue like DSL?
Substack is not one of my favorite places to discuss to say the least. It is kinda annoying.
Hey, Substack admins, are you watching this ? Your sub-garbage-tier software is literally preventing people from writing free content for you ! Hello ? Anyone home ?
To be clear: while the comment UI is part of it, I was more looking for a private discussion specifically with Deiseach
I’d love to go to a European meetup.
Does anyone have thoughts about the recent crackdowns in the Chinese tech scene?
I don't know anything about these and would like to hear more. All I've heard about recently is the flooding in Henan.
Jack Ma, the Chinese equivalent to Jeff Bezos, disappeared a few months ago. This kicked off a spate of Chinese intervention in their tech market that's gotten really intense in the last few weeks. The Chinese government has seen a sudden push of new regulation, denying permits to operate, and breaking up or even dissolving tech companies. Various tech executives have disappeared and reappeared after having undergone rectification or re-education and there are reports of engineering workforces being forced to undergo ideological training. The Chinese banks/government (same thing) have also announced they're going to radically cut financing for both venture capital and various software companies. Hundreds of billions of dollars of valuation have evaporated in weeks. No one knows where this is going to end up but it looks like the only ones untouched are those directly working for the government like Huawei or some of the surveillance companies.
Anyone betting against them building a massive governmental IT workforce?
I hadn't heard about that, and it is worrying. Looking online, he does seem to have reappeared, but it's also very plain that the government cracked down on him *hard*. He thought being rich and entrepreneurial would protect him from the fallout of criticising Chinese government financial policy, and he's learned differently. And so have any other rich Chinese entrepreneurs who might have thought about sticking their heads above the parapet.
The government has been going very hard on the patriotic line in the past couple of months; they've been celebrating the 100th anniversary of the Chinese Communist Party and all kinds of actors, singers, and entertainers in the public eye for their popularity have been having to release patriotic songs, appear in patriotic dramas, appear on celebratory TV shows, etc.
There is only so much fame and fortune you will be allowed to get away with. Any Western pipedreams that capitalism - or the lure of making a lot of money - will convert China into a 'modern secular state' are just that: the government has no objection to making a lot of money, but it can handily do that and remain a tyranny, and the fate of such as Jack Ma is a reminder: we'll let you get rich, but that doesn't mean you can defy us, and we can take it all away as easily as we let you have it in the first place.
Forbes had an article on how dangerous it is to be a Chinese billionaire. They said (half in jest) that on average one Chinese billionaire dies every 40 days. Only 14 of the 72 who've died in the last 8 years were executed by the government, but a substantial number died from foul play and suicide.
Of course, Xi has made it more dangerous for people who have their own financial or political power bases. One analyst suggests that he's trying to avoid the example of Putin, where the Russian billionaire class have enormous say over the Putin's agendas (because he governs mostly with their support). Honestly, though. Xi doesn't seem to kleptocrat, at least not at the scale Putin is. He's supposedly worth about a billion and half dollars from board positions he served on for some Fujian tech companies and from the stock options that went with those board positions. Xi's motivation is more ideological. He wants to be a "good emperor" — good emperors expand Chinese empire and crack down on nobles and warlords (who have a history of breaking up China). In modern China high party officials with independent power bases and wealthy capitalists are the equivalent and nobles and warlords. He regards every leader of China since Mao to be "failed emperors". Xi wants the 21st Century to be China's Century. And he may well be able to pull that off.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/raykwong/2011/07/25/friends-dont-let-friends-become-chinese-billionaires/?sh=1ce599592dda
https://noahpinion.substack.com/p/why-is-china-smashing-its-tech-industry
https://supchina.com/2021/07/23/chinas-after-school-tutoring-crackdown-goes-nuclear/
https://www.reuters.com/technology/china-cyberspace-administration-says-remove-25-apps-operated-by-didi-2021-07-09/
Like all authoritarian countries, the government hates & fears power centers in society that are not themselves. This is why every tinpot dictator in Africa does dumb things to harm the local, say, banking sector or telecom industry, or literally any productive or intelligent part of their country. They can't stand these alternate centers of power. A huge huge chunk of the old-school Chinese economy- raw materials manufacturing, chemical companies, all of the upstream manufacturers- are state owned, so having a dynamic part of their economy that's totally private sector must seem very strange to the CCP. I'm sure culturally the tech entrepreneurs don't really fit in well with the typical CCP bureaucrat type- lots of these tech guys lived in the US, went to school here, worked for US tech companies first, etc.
Like every authoritarian country before them, they're going to strangle the smartest most dynamic part of their economy out of fear
Seen and found plausible the take that what they're cracking down on isn't "tech" generally but ~"social media" in particular.
For whatever reason. Maybe they want the talent employed elsewhere. Or they wanna capture the market, and the data, themselves.
It's definitely not just social media. But it could be only consumer stuff like social media, ecommerce, on demand apps, etc.
Yeah, whatever the term is for stuff that faces a huge userbase
The headline reason is control of data. It's not beyond the bounds of possibility this is the case. Wierdly China seems pretty serious about having a gold-standard privacy law in place, although I doubt the CCP believe it applies to the state.
Not particularly an argument I buy, but we can't discount it out if hand just because it's the reason they are giving.
Well, they might be watching what social media is doing to the United States, and very reasonably concluding they want no part of that.
I'm in the UK and would not go to an indoor meetup in September unless cases and hospitalisations are significantly down from the current level (which depends on a whole lot of things about vaccination uptake and effectiveness we don't really know yet).
We’re in the middle of an irresponsible experiment with removing restrictions before vaccine coverage is complete, so I'd say non local indoor meets (ie of people who wouldn't normally mix, especially from multiple localities) are irresponsible to plan at this time.
On the other hand, there are lots of lovely country parks and similar outdoor venues with seating throughout the country and I'd cheerfully attend a meetup in one of those - many have roof but no walls arrangements usually used as smoking areas which are ideal for a weatherproof but relatively covid safe meetup.
Less of this please. ("fearmongering....")
To be nice and even-handed, I think both "irresponsible" and "fearmongering" in the above discussion are exaggerations. I'm somewhere between Michelle and Ryan on this point: the recent change in the UK (downgrading lockdown measures from laws to recommendations) is a calculated gamble, trading off the quality of life of the entire population against the health of those people who will get sick or die despite widespread vaccination. On those measures alone, I would lean substantially in favour of the move, but I'm also concerned about the possibility that an outbreak in a vaccinated population, while mostly harmless in itself, might promote the appearance of a vaccine-evading strain. I don't have a good way to quantify this.
Note that a previous gamble taken in the UK - increasing the separation between vaccine doses from 2 weeks to 12 weeks, so as to get more first doses out of a limited supply of vaccine - was irresponsible by conventional medical practice, as this had (at the time) not been tested. But it was (I think) a reasonable choice from an objective standpoint, and seems to have worked out quite well.
I would go to an in-person UK meetup with some concerns about Covid: I would test myself before attending, would wear a mask in public transport on the way there, and would feel slightly more comfortable if it were outside.
Giving this post a one week ban. Normally I would not be anywhere near this harsh, but I asked a question, MT answered it honestly, and I want to make sure people feel comfortable doing this without getting attacked for it so I can keep asking questions and getting honest responses in the future. Realistically this is my fault because I didn't tell people not to start arguments over the responses, but I'll give a short ban just to rub it in.
Already before covid, some meetings in Vienna were outside during summer simply because the air was better outside. And it was nice! But the difference was that we could be flexible: if we knew it was going to rain, we had the meeting indoors instead.
Unfortunately, the weather forecast is not reliable many days in advance. So we need to think about the scenario "we agree to be outdoor, because covid, and then it rains".
That is why I suggested looking for venues with a covered outdoor area - if it gets extremely windy as well as rain it won't be ideal, but it protects your meetup from most summer weather conditions.
Or we just check the weather forecast and take a rain check - though of course British climate is notoriously anti-rationalist 😅
I live in Galway Ireland. Rainfall radar where you can see where precipitation has been happening and how it is moving is the only weather forecast I trust. And even it can be at odds with on-the-ground wet reality.
Hey Michelle, I'd be happy to host or attend an outdoor UK ACX meetup - picnic in a park or similar - where are you based?
Cambridge - there was a reasonably regular SSC meetup around here in the Before Times.
Ah OK - I'm in Windsor - are you aware of ACX folk who meet in that hive of sin and irrationalism that there London?
Not particularly, sorry.
Further down the comments there's a comment by someone who is interested in organising in London: https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/open-thread-182/comments#comment-2459478
fab thanks - I found Phil via LessWrong London and emailed him
I'd argue that it's irresponsible to *not* have September indoor meetups, at least in places where vaccines are generally available - once vaccination of the willing is complete, the biggest danger from covid is that governments (or culture) go into permanent covid mode, where they keep travel and gathering restrictions or limits forever on increasingly thin pretext. "Universal vaccination" is pretty much the only Schelling point we have on when to come out of lockdown, and if we don't use it we might be stuck in lockdown misery for decades (just like we are with the TSA).
I wouldn't create a group identity for those wanting lockdowns. They've got their varied reasons for their position, and it's going to be easier to argue against them on a group-by-group basis rather than lumping them all together and making the voluntary hermits and the Marxist state maximalists unlikely allies under one banner. Identity creates alliance, so don't give your political opponents a label that unites them.
But some Marxists are concerned about the effect lockdowns have on workers whilst others see this as a way of establishing a norm of state control over the freedom of workers. So not all Marxists agree here, so assuming I am opposed to the continued existence of lockdown laws some Marxists are my allies, some are my opponents.
Um . . . are there actually any maximal pro-lockdown for state control Marxists? Like, I've seen this as a talking point for the last year and a half, that pro-lockdown people are all Marxists and this is how communism comes to America and all, but, only from Maga-types who hated the lockdowns. Are there any public Marxists out there saying that the lockdowns are great because the gov't is finally taking over? Because I think this group is likely imaginary.
I offer Susan Michie, a member of the UK communist party and a proponent of stricter lockdowns as part of the 'Independent Sage' group (self-appointed scientific activists). Also amusingly someone who doesn't like interviewers bringing up her politics... She seems to be a good example here.
The most important question about the lockdown: "What would Stalin do?"
Seems to me that another good Schelling point is "universal vaccination *plus* case counts lower than those during any "wave"". This might not be precise enough for a Schelling point, but "universal vaccination" isn't exactly either. But something like >70% of adult population vaccinated and <10 cases per 100,000 people per day is precise.
So I think this is the difference between a Schelling point and a stopping point. What you say would make a good stopping point, but it would have to be declared by a central authority with the competence to decide on it and the credibility to be trusted to be consistent on it, and none of our actual central authorities (at least, in America - somewhere like Singapore might be different - ) have either of those things.
A Schelling point has to ake up for lacking a central authority by being the overwhelmingly obvious point of coordination. Aside from "vaccines are universally available", the only other candidate is true elimination of covid, and it's looking like that's not going to happen for years, if ever.
I don't expect this to be a problem: countries do generally seem to lift restrictions when the case count is very low. (But see my sibling comment to yours.)
The problem is that one of the possible endgames is that between unvaccinated people and breakthrough variants we can't suppress case rates to a very low level—but the rate of fatalities and severe cases becomes very low, especially among the vaccinated. But people look at the case count and get scared: see e.g. how many people criticize the UK government for lifting the restrictions, even though the death rate is an order of magnitude less than at the same stage of the previous wave.
Ok, I've been trying to search and collect evidence and studies that show if antipsychotic do, or not, shrinks the brain in the long term, so does anyone know about more this topic? Any help would be appreciated.
A couple of open threads ago I rambled on about what the US as a multiparty system would look like. I hope it's not gauche for me to continue talking about it, because I've been thinking about this a lot, and also I got some interesting new data. The Republican polling firm Echelon Insights conducted a bunch of research on this exact topic- their Twitter thread about it is here
https://twitter.com/EchelonInsights/status/1196494470772072448
They theorize 5 political parties for the US- Nationalist (Trumpy), Conservative (Reagan/country club Republican), Acela (Bloomberg/neoliberal), Labor (blue collar economically liberal/socially conservative) and Green (AOC). From their original sample, their respondents broke down at 19/21/12/28/10%, respectively- Labor being the single most popular party. (Interestingly I had a hard time thinking of a US politician to use as an example for that).
As I mentioned, traditional Poli Sci teaches that multiparty presidential systems are pretty dysfunctional, with Latin America being the classic example. The parties squabble, and with a separately elected President with no power to advance legislation on his/her own, not much gets done. I'm trying to imagine how these 5 parties would govern together if they were in Congress now, with Biden as President.
Part of my skepticism is that the present US system incentivizes politicians to act unusually crazily, to bring in campaign donations, and there are no strong party actors to say 'stop being quite so crazy on social media or we'll kick you out'. So the Nationalist and Green parties would be even more obstreperous, because their voters & donors demand it. 'Sure, we'll pass a budget/raise the debt ceiling/fund the military.... once you kick every illegal immigrant out of the country!' says the Marjorie Taylor Green-lead Nationalist party. Or, nationalize every oil company for the AOC-lead Green party, etc.
But- maybe the two more centrist parties would just form a coalition together every single year, and mostly ignore the more extreme parties? This seems to be how, say, Germany runs. Anyways, would be interested in hearing other peoples' points of view. Could these 5 parties pass major legislation on a regular basis? What's political life like in a European country that just gets run by the same two centrist parties every year?
Two other parliamentary countries with proportional representation that I know of are Italy and Israel. The governments of these are much more unstable than Germany's. Parties and coalitions rearrange all the time, and often a coalition member quits and causes the government to fall, leading to either a new election, or at least a new coalition and government in the current parliament. I don't know what factor makes German governments more stable.
From Wikipedia/ChancellorOfGermany/role:
The first chancellor, Konrad Adenauer, set many precedents that continue today and established the chancellorship as the clear focus of power in Germany. Under the provisions of the Basic Law giving him the power to set guidelines for all fields of policy, Adenauer arrogated nearly all major decisions to himself. He often treated his ministers as mere extensions of his authority rather than colleagues. While his successors have tended to be less domineering, the chancellor has acquired enough ex officio authority (in addition to his/her constitutional powers) that Germany is often described by constitutional law experts as a "chancellor democracy".
So a really strong central executive, apparently.
Maybe Germany's stability comes from bad memories of/learning from the Weimar Republic.
I'm certainly interested in this topic. I assume the other 10% would go to a Ron Paul Libertarianism or a Ted Cruz Christian party. I think how Britain does it is that the leader of the party has a lot of power to crack down on members trying to grab the spotlight- most voters don't even know their own representative, they just vote for the face of the party and the lower politicians are assumed to follow the leaders directions (source:cgp grey). So the leader may make a strong effort to compromise, because if they get a reputation for getting things done that's an incentive for opposition voters to cross party lines to their second choice party.
As for germany Merkel must have a lot of influence or she wouldnt be so famous.
I'm actually not that familiar, but i'll read anything you would like to elaborate on or link to.
I view the existence of parties to be prima facie bad; right now the US has a (mostly) de facto party system as a side effect of FPTP. *Why* there would be multiple viable parties makes a huge difference to whether it would be better or worse than current state (e.g., the necessarily de jure party system of proportional representation would be worse; whereas a loose de facto multiparty system arising out of some form of ranked choice or approval voting would probably be better). Also, legislative coalitions need not be consistent from bill to bill under a Presidential executive branch.
I mean, the standard poli sci argument is that Parties Are Good, Actually. And if that isn't true, they seem to be inevitable- is there any country that doesn't have them? As the US already has the weakest parties in the developed world, we've begun to test what it's like to run random celebrities as candidates just based on name recognition- I don't personally think it's a great system....
'Also, legislative coalitions need not be consistent from bill to bill under a Presidential executive branch'- is this true in LatAm? Maybe it is, I'd certainly be interested in learning more. My understanding of coalitions is that they are consistent, and that they break apart if the parties start splitting up bill by bill.
One of my random ideas is that we form strong sub-brands or mini parties inside the current Dem & Republican parties- Justice Dems, Blue Dog Dems, America First Republicans, Country Club Republicans, etc. Then both parties would run their top 2 or 3 candidates via approval voting in the general. So 4-6 candidates, each with their party sub-brand
I'm not familiar with the party systems of LatAm and, given how often I hear Americans describe how something works "in Europe", my immediate reaction is skepticism that the systems are similar enough for a discussion of them as a coherent whole to be meaningful.
I try to avoid harping on my main position too much, but FPTP is so suboptimal and upstream of so many dysfunctions in the US that I view reform proposals that don't address it as either naive or minor. My main concern in this space is that some alternatives to FPTP make party identification a necessary component; if a Condorcet system ends up with parties then so be it, but on the off chance they're not inevitable I'd rather not design them in anyway.
Separately, when I looked for arguments in favor of political parties everything I found was either not unique to parties (i.e., could be replicated through interest groups), presumed a ceteris paribus universe (i.e., nothing else changed except no parties), or were things I oppose (e.g., encourage public participation, make decisions faster).
I feel that political parties cause issues as well, and like the idea of them not existing.
I accept that people will tend have clusters in their preferences, but I really don't like the way parties form block votes, requiring their members to vote the same way.
Having just two parties which might win is the theoretical minimum of a democracy, and can often give effectively no valid choices for strongly held opinions on important topics in practice.
Why not have an election of a fully independent member of congress/representative (US) or member of parliament (UK) in each area. Each candidate could explicitly state what they stood for, their principles and favoured issues. I know they do that anyway, sort of, but effectively most people are primarily voting for the party.
In the UK at least, MPs vote between themselves to elect the prime minister (who then picks a cabinet from the other MPs) - so no further tweaking to choose a head of government is necessary.
However, I imagine that political parties form a kind of end-state regardless of how you start. What change could be made to a current system to make independence more powerful?
The value of parties is that they make for informed voters. If you don't have parties, most voters vote based on feelings they get from personal resonances in TV ads, which are much less informed than just knowing that Democrats are for legal abortion and higher taxes and services while Republicans are for banned abortion and lower taxes and services.
I think you could plausibly put Biden or Manchin under labor, though I'd guess you'd argue that they fit better under Acela and I would grant that you have a case. Going back a bit, Dick Gephardt certainly fit the bill.
Sherrod Brown, the senator from Ohio, comes to mind. There really aren't many old-school labor Democrats left these days, much less labor leaders who are prominent in national politics like John Lewis or Walter Reuther. I follow these things fairly closely and it took me several moments to remember the name of the current leader of the AFL-CIO, Richard Trumka.
This is very interesting, indeed. Given the same data sets, different teams will draw different conclusions based on the decisions they made during the analysis process. And cognitive bias, at least in regards to the prior beliefs and attitudes, had much less effect on the results than expected. I'm still absorbing this, but I thought I'd put it out there for the rationalist community to consider...
"Abstract:
How does noise generated by researcher decisions undermine the credibility of science? We test this by observing all decisions made among 73 research teams as they independently conduct studies on the same hypothesis with identical starting data. We find excessive variation of outcomes. When combined, the 107 observed research decisions taken across teams explained at most 2.6% of the total variance in effect sizes and 10% of the deviance in subjective conclusions. Expertise, prior beliefs and attitudes of the researchers explain even less. Each model deployed to test the hypothesis was unique, which highlights a vast universe of research design variability that is normally hidden from view and suggests humility when presenting and interpreting scientific findings."
https://osf.io/preprints/metaarxiv/cd5j9/
No, takers, huh? I'm not trying to be snarky, but I want to hear what Deep Bayesians have to say about this article...
The biases we're referring to tend to be "small": your first idea that seems to work is hard to let go, regardless of its source. I'd _totally_ expect that to manifest as "a vast universe of research design variability that is normally hidden from view". "Humility when presenting and interpreting scientific findings" feels like a core principle of the rationality crowd.
Guessing there's a vocabulary drift, such that most people think of Big Culture™ problems when they see the words "cognitive bias"? The way you say "prior beliefs and attitudes" makes me think that's closer to what you meant, vs the (for example) "I got a headache when I changed the lightbulb, and it went away when I changed back, so it was obviously the lightbulb!" level of confirmation bias that we (or at least, I) try to focus on.
That's definitely an interesting result, but I feel it leaves too many questions unanswered. They have a large unexplained variance and attribute it "idiosyncratic researcher variability", but that seems very vague to me. I think it'd be enlightening to do a detailed breakdown of some models that gave opposite conclusions, and try to figure out what the driving factors were. Is it the interpretation of the thesis into a statistical question? Is it methods to clean data? Adjusting for confounders? It wouldn't be surprising to me if interpretation or confounders reversed results, but it would be surprising to me if cleaning data did.
To their credit, they have a ton of supplementary materials available, so I might be able to find out myself--if I had the will and the time.
I got confused with their multiverse analysis. My reading is that they ran a whole class of models with varying modeling decisions. Then they explain 16% of the variance of the outcome. I don't understand why it's not 100%--if you're accounting for every parameter that went in, then you can explain 100% of the variation of the outcome, right? So I must be misunderstanding something. I feel this is important because it could suggest much of the unexplained variance should really be research design variance. (Again, although there's enough supplementary material that I could probably figure this out myself, it's not something I have the will and time for.)
Agree. I think this would be study that would be difficult to reproduce — at least in the way they ran it. But it does suggest some interesting avenues for further investigation.
Paul Graham asked recently, "What's the oldest man-made object that you can hold in your hands that has never been lost and later found by someone else?" I found it to be a fun rabbit hole and posted my answers here: http://llamasandmystegosaurus.blogspot.com/2021/06/the-oldest-thing-that-has-never-been.html but I'd like to get help from some of the knowledgeable crowd here.
(I tried to post this on the subreddit, but it was removed and they said to post it here.)
I'd go with a church treasure or document. The oldest I can say I've not held but certainly looked at and registered it could be picked up in my hand is a charter in Worcester cathedral from the 730s. I think that's as old as you'll get in Britain and northern Europe, but I suspect the Papacy at least have older objects they've had since creation/gifting, as may some of the other western Mediterranean churches and probably several of the eastern churches. Buddhist temples and maybe some Hindu ones could also have continuity of ownership although the British Empire and the Chinese government may have disrupted things a bit.
A treasure would last longer than a document. Gold and gems have a much longer shelf life than paper.
And a longer shelf life than parchment.
But people are much more motivated to 'borrow' them. I considered treasures alongside documents, but I think the oldest non-documentary never-lost item in Britain is a knife in Durham Cathedral's treasury. Nothing special (it was a symbolic gift representing the transfer of land I believe) so not worth stealing/trading. I suspect there's older examples around but I doubt they will approach documents in this category.
Incidentally, papyrus lasts a long time in the right conditions, so has a very long shelf life on a dry, qute warm shelf. As does paper (parchment's exact shelf life is less established I think due to being used in more marginal environments and generally later).
From some googling it looks like the oldest document in the Vatican is the Vergilus Vaticanus https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vergilius_Vaticanus, from around 400 AD. The exact chain of ownership from 400 to 900 AD isn't known, but that doesn't mean it necessarily got "lost" during this period.
I'd apply a historian's definition of lost here, so ownership unknown. Otherwise we have to allow some slightly crackpot claims in implying continuity with the apostles or the pharoahs... Also, a lot of manuscripts were rediscovered (admittedly probably sitting an the bottom of a bookchest) in the eighth and ninth century when the Carolingian renaissance (sic) causes a renewed interest in old works, so I would be happy arguing the Virgil Vaticanus was likely lost for a while.
That said, it would be great if the oldest continuously-owned item in church possession was the work of a secular, pre-Christian poet...
This is a tricky question with lots of weird edge cases – for example, many of the Willendorf-style "Venus" statues were never lost, they were *deliberately buried* and later found. I presume you'd count that as lost, but then how about a book that's been in the same library for hundreds of years without anybody actually caring about it, despite the catalogue indicating its exact shelf location the whole time, until someone did care and "rediscovered" it, highlighting its importance? Or grave goods located in a Christian church but undisturbed and unseen for centuries, such as certain relics? Or how about the Mona Lisa, which was stolen, and shortly thereafter returned? It went missing from its "proper" place, but there was continuity of possession – at least one person knew where it was at any given moment.
Those preliminaries aside, I would have to guess that the Codex Sinaiticus, the oldest Bible in the world, currently housed in the British Library (if you want to find it, it's next to the case containing the second-oldest Bible in the world), is a strong candidate; it's older than the Vatican Virgil and, although the provenance isn't fully charted, is unlikely to have ever been lost and then refound. At one point a guy who stole it claimed to have found it in a wastepaper basket (thrown out by monks, no less!), but I think we can disregard that as an obvious fabrication by a thief.
I'm not sure we can say the Codex Sinaiticus has not been lost, since it is only recorded from 1761 at the earliest. We can say it wasn't written at the monastery of St Catherine's though since it predates that (or any other Christian) monastery, so there clearly has been at least one change of ownership. I guess the question is whether we have to know loss happened or whether we want clear evidence loss did not happen.
I'm going "balance of probabilities" here. I agree that it clearly can't have originated in the monastery where it was first recorded in modern times, but on balance it seems to me to be much more likely that it was carried from one monastery or shrine to another in unbroken tradition, first as "a Bible, we need those for obvious reasons" and later as an increasingly precious relic. I have a few arguments in defense of this besides mere intuition about how these things go: few Bibles seem to have been lost at all except to pillaging and other pagan destruction, since they were in the possession of religious institutions whose whole purpose was to pass on these exact scriptures; most Bibles lost in the monastic system were either scraped as palimpsests to rewrite a better copy clean on the same parchment, or if they were in really bad shape, cut up for use as bookbinding materials in new Bibles (one often finds parchment strips with writing in the spines in particular); those Bibles that *were* lost don't seem to have been often recovered – I can't off the top of my head think of a single such case although of course that in itself proves nothing; increasingly as the codex became more valued by the monks, they would have taken care to prevent it from going astray, even above what they would normally apply to keep their books safe which, again, is a great deal.
Anyhow, if you wanted an *absolutely* ironclad moment-to-moment provenance I don't think you can possibly get back further than items made in the late 16th century, as the very idea of written provenances, collection catalogues etc. is not terribly old.
I love all the answers people have posted. Personally, I think a written provenance criterion is too strict. If it's in a warehouse somewhere or a bank or palace or museum basement or forgotten in a library, fine with me-- someone still is keeping it. The thing being ruled out here is the object being rediscovered by an archaeologist.
So, im gonna take this a different direction. Assuming we have some sort of metaphysical arbiter that knows wether an item has been held before by a human i would just start picking up rocks that wash up on the beach. One of them must have started as something that you could consider the same rock over 2k years ago and now its palm sized.
oh ok no editing,
the point is, if im the first one to pick it up then it hasn't been lost and found, only found.
also maybe a freshly mined rough diamond fits the bill
The recent wave of COVID infections is almost exclusively among unvaccinated people. I assume the vast majority of ACX readers who have access to a vaccine has gotten one, so I don't see much risk for a gathering in areas where it is widely available. I would go to a meetup, but there isn't one anywhere near me.
https://apnews.com/article/coronavirus-pandemic-health-941fcf43d9731c76c16e7354f5d5e187
Two factors affect how many infections in unvaccinated vs vaccinated: the protection afforded by the vaccine, and the respective sizes of the two populations. As you note, it is harder to work out if you are only looking hospitalisation, and there is also the complication of asymptotic infection.
Best data I can find is from the UK REACT study, which works by randomly sampling total UK population every two weeks. In the last round but one (8th July) they reported infection rates were 3x lower for fully vaccinated people.
https://www.gov.uk/government/news/latest-react-1-study-findings-show-covid-19-infection-rates-three-times-lower-for-double-vaccinated-people
So if your vaccinated population is 3x the unvaccinated, which is roughly where we are in the UK, you would see the same absolute numbers of infections in vac and unvac - which is roughly what we are getting right now. Many few vac end up in hospital, though.
https://covid.cdc.gov/covid-data-tracker/#vaccination-case-rate
compare that data above with this https://covid.cdc.gov/covid-data-tracker/#cases_casesper100klast7days and it's not difficult to draw conclusions. Why the CDC doesn't just post the numbers on hospitalized unvaccinated is beyond me but apparently has something to do with the lack of consistent reporting from a certain state - no need to guess which one - it's that big thing on the southern border showing no data available.
Welllllll, with some caveats. LA is seeing that 20 percent of the new Delta infections are among fully vaccinated people. But as of last week ZERO of those infections resulted in hospitalization. It's the unvaxxed that heading for the ICU — and possibly the morgue.
If only we could upload our consciousness into a computer simulation we wouldn't have to worry about our bodies. Of course, it would be inevitable that there would be pathogenic programs in such a system...
In the Crazy Like Us Review, Scott wondered what a society with Mental Health Unawareness Campaigns would be like. It was presented as fanciful, but his description actually reminded me of one real society---Nazi Germany in the Second World War. At least according to the Israeli military historian Martin van Creveld in his book Fighting Power, the Nazis disdained psychiatry as a Jewish science and had very little willingness, compared to the Anglo-Saxon countries, to accommodate soldiers with what we would now call PTSD.
And, at least according to van Creveld, it worked---the German armed forces had considerably lower rates of mental health casualties than Anglo-American ones. He further argues, in an anti-mental health/psychiatry vein, that this was a difference in the actual incidence of the problem, not merely in reporting/diagnosis. I don't know anywhere near enough to say if this is an accurate judgement, but perhaps people more knowledgeable about these issues would find the chapter discussing this interesting.
https://www.amazon.com/Fighting-Power-Performance-1939-1945-Contributions/dp/0313091579
Also, maybe someone brought this up already, but I feel obligated to mention Sebastian Junger's book Tribe, which argues that warfare (e.g. London during the Blitz) can often *decrease* the prevalence of mental health issues.
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B01F7UOSU0/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?_encoding=UTF8&btkr=1
Greg Cochran said it was both the Nazis & Soviets that reaped benefits from not sharing the American belief in combat fatigue: https://westhunt.wordpress.com/2014/10/20/the-experts/
As I understand it the German army, for reasons unrelated to their politically-motivated psychiatric beliefs, had a troop rotation policy that was much more aligned with what the enlightened western allies would later determine to be the best way to treat PTSD.
To be specific, the Germans kept units at the front until the unit as a whole was combat-ineffective (i.e roughly 10-20% casualties from all causes), then rotated the entire unit to the near-rear for R&R and integrating replacements, then rotated it back to the front. The US & company kept units at the front almost continuously, removing individual soldiers as they became casualties, and backfilling at the front with replacements. The casualties, insofar as their physical or psychological injuries had rendered them combat-ineffective, were sent home - or if they did manage to recover, were sent to whichever unit needed an immediate replacement. This had nothing to do with anyone's PTSD policy, because nobody understood PTSD well enough to create a decent PTSD-specific policy, they just treated individual victims as another sort of casualty when the symptoms were too severe to ignore.
The best way to treat combat-related PTSD appears to be to catch it as early as possible, before the particular victim's symptoms have become severe enough to render them wholly combat-ineffective. To give them someone to talk to in a safe environment, ideally a psychiatrist who understands PTSD but a chaplain or a sympathetic buddy in a pinch. And then if they are up for it, send them back to the front with the same people they are starting to feel that they have abandoned and betrayed in their "weakness".
For all but the worst cases (the ones in the 10-20% all-casualties total that resulted in the unit being pulled back), the German rotation doctrine accomplished this better than the Allied. By accident rather than design, but it worked.
My understanding is that their thinking was heavily influenced by WW1. The French army actually mutinied and started refusing orders. The German army hadn't, but German commanders were quite spooked about the possibility. The British blockade eventually resulted in the Germans succumbing, and there was a mutiny in the German navy, so the Germans regarded it as imperative to avoid that and keep the population well-fed. But their thinking was less about individual soldiers being ineffective and more about whether their units would still be reliable.
People always talk about how Thomas Hobbes' Leviathan was Deeply Influenced by his observation of the English Civil War. But wasn't the English Civil War sort of, if anything, the exact *opposite* of a Hobbesian conflict? Two organized factions fought for control of a powerful, centralized state, driven by high-minded religious/ideological beliefs. In doing so, they, at least by the standards of most civil wars, generally respected civilians and private property. Whereas the brutal, self-interested, disorganized, etc. dynamics of conflict that Hobbes so insightfully described would seem more evident in e.g. the Scottish Highlands or rural Ireland, or in England during the Dark Ages.
You qualified England as during the dark ages, but rural Ireland and the Scottish highlands are eternally brutal.
Links post gave me a thought re. Bullying.
For those of you that were bullied:
If you were bullied physically (that is, people consistently and without provocation went past threating and actually hit you/physically prevented you from moving),
did this increase or decrease your fear of violence vs:
People that never got past the threatening phase, ie, you are surrounded and can't leave, but nobody is hitting you/holding you down?
I routinely got into fights and occasionally got lightly beaten by a group, and after getting out of the system, I notice that I am not afraid of physical violence/confrontation at all, but I get very quickly keyed up when someone is confrontational (I.e, if I am in a situation where another man whom I am having a negative interaction with approaches closer that 2 feet, my heart rate picks up and I feel myself entering fight mode, like I am 2 rounds deep into a sport fighting match.)
This means I do well in arguments/ aggressive negotiation at work and out, but that I need to be very aware of what is actually a threat, and what is behavior from someone who's never been struck with murder aforethought.
I wonder if having the threatening behavior without the actual physical component would have been even worse.
No idea. I was already conflict-avoidant long before I was bullied, so I don't know how the counterfactual me would feel/behave.
Oof.
May I suggest getting into a bunch of violent altercations as a teenager? It replaced any conflict avoidance I had with anger problems!
It didn't work that way for me. I started off with an strong aversion for violence, where I would only fight back after an immense amount of bullying, but this never changed along the way.
It wasn't that choosing to fight would lower the barrier and would make it easier to do so the next time. It was more that the frustration would be lifted a bit and then it took a very long time for the bucket to overflow again.
Not a huge amount of responses, but it does make me question my Idea.
I think I have a similar reaction. I was much smaller than other kids at school for a long time, and I also had a smart mouth. (Maybe I still do?) I got smacked around a little bit at school, but never seriously hurt. But I was afraid at school a lot when I was 7-9th grades.
When there's a threat of a fight, I get a high heart rate and sometimes even the shakes, even when I'm not afraid, which is really annoying. I'm not sure if that's a result of the bullying or just how I am, though.
I don't think I'm an aggressive negotiator. I won't haggle on a car or at a yard sale, for instance. Not sure if that's just avoiding a fight or just not caring enough, though.
I almost wish I could have gone to Vietnam to see how I'd have held up in real danger.
I was frequently verbally bullied when I was in middle school, but very rarely physically bullied. And that was just being pushed around; I've never been punched or beaten up, I don't think I've even been in any kind of real fight (wrestling with neighborhood kids or cousins doesn't count) since I was six years old.
But my adult mental state is almost exactly the same as yours. I'm mostly easygoing, but I can really get mean with administrators (it's always administrators) who are pushing around me or my family. (I blew a fuse at the hospital a week ago.)
I think my main difference from other people due to bullying is that I'm very PTSD-prone. The first few girls I talked with rejected me, so I have extreme anxiety at the thought of talking socially to attractive women, and have had that all my life, and probably will have it forever.
I did a 180 on a snowy highway five years ago, and while it didn't terrify me, it made me terrified of driving. I'm coming back from that and can drive alone almost anywhere in my city now, but not on interstates or over certain bridges.
I had some mental problems when I was socially isolated when I was young, and I've been very scared of being isolated since then.
These responses are making me think that the whole conflict averse/tolerant and violence averse/seeking are on separate axis, and are at least a bit inborne.
So long as the meetups are outside in the open air, I don't consider them irresponsible. If one were to happen in Amsterdam or anywhere else in the Netherlands I would definitely go.
Serbia is opening up, and while in September more soft measures might be in place, a meeting in the open air should not be a problem. I don't think there's any, but I'd be willing to organize some! Perhaps monthly or bi-weekly, don't know how I can find out if there's interest (except through this comment I suppose)
Re: meetups: I would not go, and I would consider it vaguely irresponsible to hold or promote indoor meet-ups in September. I'm in the UK.
https://advisory.kpmg.us/articles/2021/limits-to-growth.html
You may have seen this paper, covered recently in media e.g. Vice and the Guardian (UK), which plugs recent data into some 20th century modelling of the risk of catastrophic societal collapse in the mid-21st. It concludes that we're in a critical 10-20 year period in which 'business as usual' is likely to be disastrous. I don't know enough to appraise it though and would appreciate insights from anyone who does.
In other news, still no limits to bears... https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/09/03/the-guardian-vs-induction/
The original book apparently discussed four scenarios: BAU (strong growth until ~2015, sharp collapse from then), BAU2 (more resources discovered, collapse starts later), CT (decline at some later point but no collapse due to high technological development) and SW (voluntarily limiting/stopping growth, resulting in stabilization).
What this paper seems to do is look at which of the four models matches the real-world trajectory the best. What it doesn't to is prove that the book's model is correct, and the future will be anything like one of its scenarios.
In previous updates, the BAU scenario matched the actual figures the best. Since the world economy didn't start to collapse around 2015, the BAU2 and CT scenarios are now the best match; since we didn't start to significantly limit growth, SW is the worst match.
In other words, as far as I can tell, what this paper shows is that we are still growing fast. What it doesn't show is that we're going to collapse.
The world will, one assumes, one day run out of oil.
No it won’t. As the Saudi minister said the stone Age didn’t end because we ran out of stone.
While I can certainly appreciate the petulant implication here--someone, somewhere simply *must* discover some thing that will enable business as usual--the universe is rarely that accommodating to human desires or notions of fairness.
But we have discovered something that will totally or mostly replace oil - nuclear and renewables. In any case there’s more oil out there than people realise, the 30 years of reserves left we always hear about is of “proved” production. That is proven oil fields where the oil is flowing, not known oil fields not yet tapped. Include the latter and you get about 100 years in reserve. Include all known reserves not tapped because they are technically or economically yet unviable and it’s a few hundred years. Not all of these will become viable but enough will. Shale fields were unviable once. Venezuelan oil was too heavy. Technology changed.
A few years ago a search for peak oil would get you results about peak supply. Now it’s peak demand. As oil gets swapped out demand is expected to fall even as the global economy grows.
I have to agree with Doc. And I always feel it necessary to do a reality check on statements like this.
Our civilization currently consumes 21 TWY (TeraWatt Years) of energy yearly. Say an averaged size nuke puts out 1 GWh or 1,000 MegaWatts hours of energy — said nuke will (with no down time) put out 8,760,000 MWh in the course of a year -- or 8.76 TWh. Divide by the 8760 hours in a year, and you get 0.001 TWY. So it would take 21,000 1-GigaWatt nukes to equal our global energy expenditure. Each of those 1-GigaWatt plants would consume 27.6 metric tonnes of reactor grade Uranium each year. 54,000 mts of U are produced each year. We'd reach peak Uranium after feeding 1,900 1-Gigawatt nukes. And alternative reactor technologies are not ready for prime time. These include breeder reactors, Thorium reactors, and "mining" Uranium from sea water.
So nukes are out. Fusion? Well, Fusion seems always to be 20 or 30 years in the future.
Plus oil is mostly used in transportation. Ships and planes won't run far on battery power. So even though renewables are supposed to meet 45 percent of our energy needs by 2040, we'll still need oil for transportation.
It's pleasant to think that technology will bail us out, but energy is the key dependency of our current civilization. I think we're more likely to see catastrophic economic disruption in the next 30-50 years that could end our comfortable techno civilization. And I think that will get us before AGW gets us 50-80 years out. I feel lucky that I'm living in a golden age, and that I'll probably be dead before I see its end.
What I expect is that as oil (or other finite natural resources) become scarcer, the remaining resources will gradually become more and more expensive (as the only remaining sources are more costly to extract), and that will make the economy adapt to using less of them. We won't suddenly hit a wall. (Though with oil, we'll probably gradually stop using it in favor of renewable energy out of concerns about global warming before we would run out of it.)
As the new study admits in Section 1.4, the book didn't consider this corrective price mechanism. It's far from obvious that it's preferable, let alone necessary to avoid collapse, to purposely restrict our resource consumption (presumably through government force) rather than let the above market mechanism run its course. Perhaps we do, but this study doesn't tell us that. It only considers four specific scenarios from a 1972 book, which didn't consider a realistic price mechanism.
Or we could just make more with sunlight. Or, as we have continued to, find new ways of extraction that will last for a while.
The world will eventually run out of energy quanta and the negative of entropy quanta, probably, but that doesn’t say much.
Doesn't seem any more likely than that it will run out of iron, or water, or lithium. When the price for pulling it out of the ground increases enough, it will be cost-effective at the margin to recycle it, and that's what will happen. By "recycling" I mean pull the CO2 and H2O out of the atmosphere and reconstitute the hydrocarbon.
How that will be done is an interesting question, but given the fact that this is exactly what green plants do, and where the oil came from in the first place, it seems rather likely it will go through some kind of engineered photosynthetic organism.
It’s just throwing numbers at each other. The model has a lot of specific details in resources and population and whatever that are empirically false (oil and resource usage isn’t running out as we transition out) and demographic factors appear to be currently smoothed out by the demographic transition.
Come back Club of Rome - all is forgiven 🤣 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Limits_to_Growth
Seeking advice: should I pressure my aunt into getting the COVID vaccine?
Context: My aunt is 78 years old, and I'm the only remaining family member that she's close to. I'm about to have a baby, and she is very excited for me and is eager to meet the baby. This would involve airplane travel. She has not gotten the COVID vaccine (or any vaccine for many years, even the flu shot). She's not ferociously anti-vax, but believes very strongly in "natural medicine" and thinks that "putting artificial things" in her body is a bad idea.
I am tempted to tell her she can't meet the baby unless she gets vaccinated. Partly out of potential risk to the baby, but mostly because I'm extremely worried she's going to get COVID and I haven't been able to make any progress with gentle persuasion. The pressure might work, but it would feel cruel, like I'm emotionally blackmailing her. I'm also concerned she might A) refuse or B) lie to me that she's gotten it.
How do you think she would react if you asked for vaccination "as a favour", something which would make you feel safer, taking away one of the things you need to worry about in this stressful new situation?
That's a good idea, that could be a much more palatable way to present it... I'm going to think it over, thank you.
No, not anymore than you should pressure people you know to stop driving to lower air pollution to save your babies lungs.
Thank you for the response, I appreciate hearing all perspectives. (Just to clarify: my primary concern in this matter is my aunt's health. I'm only very slightly concerned about any risk to the baby from COVID.)
I don't see how it is reasonable to try to blackmail her to get vaccinated for her own health. Threat her like an adult. Try to convince her with arguments and if she refuses, merely act on your own health concerns (which includes your baby).
Note that the vaccinated can also get ill and pass on the virus, so acting differently for the sake of your baby depending on whether she gets vaccinated may not make much sense.
Thank you for the advice; you've put your finger on the exact reason why I'm hesitating. The majority of my friends and family have been completely in favor of the idea of issuing an ultimatum to my aunt in order to try and force her to get vaccinated for her own good. I understand the reasoning--which is why I'm still considering it--but it feels condescending and manipulative.
I don't follow her health advice (e.g. to use essential oils instead of getting the flu shot each year) because I think it's incorrect and I'm an adult who can make my own decisions. She respects that choice, although she disagrees. So far, I've always extended the same respect to her.
You might want to consider a more effective communication strategy, like going to a COVID survivor forum and finding someone who also trusted in healthy living and the like, but still got seriously ill, much more so than for the regular flu. Then put them in touch with your aunt and see if that works better.
In general, the message that this is much worse than the flu and that her normal strategy is merely not enough for COVID, even though it is for the flu, is probably much more persuasive than trying to convert her to a general pro-vaccine position. Primarily because this doesn't require her to completely change her position, but just add a partial exception, where COVID is best combated with essential oils plus a vaccine.
Another option is to explain something similar to the above yourself, but then without compromising your own beliefs. Explain to her that being healthy does reduce the risks (which it actually does, although not as much as she thinks), but this virus is so dangerous that it isn't enough just to be healthy. To illustrate this, you might show some testimony by a very athletic youth that got a nasty case of the COVIDs.
And you may also want to address your own beliefs. The fatality rate of her age group is probably between 4% and 13%, so it's far from a death sentence. And the chance that she gets it through travel is considerably below 100%. So realistically, the actual chance is considerably lower than 13%. So the chance is pretty good that she'll be all right. You could choose to accept that she is probably taking a similar risk to someone climbing Mount Everest.
Or, you could sidestep the issue by finding someone dependable and safe to drive across the country to pick up your aunt and drive her over (depending on how far away she is).
Arguably you should pressure people into buying HEPA air filters for their homes.
I think this would be manipulative and unethical, unless you can honestly say the risk to your baby alone would be enough to make you do this. Your aunt's choice is unwise, but it's hers to make. Withholding affection (access to your baby is a form of affection) from someone to make them do what you want is a terrible way to interact with people, and I suspect it will quickly erode your sense of respect and empathy if you start down that path.
IMO it’s fine to restrict aunt from traveling to you if you think there’s a significant risk of harm to them. It isn’t “her choice to make” in a freedom sense if it’s traveling to you. Withholding affection is fine if the affection has a mild side effect of death.
This is a rather old person, who may not receive all that much affection. This might be the highlight of her year (or even the rest of her life).
We all make choices that increase our risk of death for quality of life reasons. It's her choice.
They can’t receive affection if they’re dead! And in general, and especially with old people who are often quite stubborn, some amount of antagonism and coercion can be necessary. In this case it isn’t even coercion though, just a plain “you can’t visit because I don’t want you to die”. My grandpa wasn’t allowed to drive a car anymore by his family even though he had a license - for his safety - is that coercion? It significantly restricts his freedom.
And there’s also phones you can call them and talk!
The typical reason to disallow the elderly to drive is not their safety, but the safety of others. If it's just their safety, it's their call, IMO, just like if they prefer to risk death due to COVID while meeting family, over meeting family with a vaccine or staying at home.
> In this case it isn’t even coercion though, just a plain “you can’t visit because I don’t want you to die”.
That is coercion. If they want to do something that has certain consequences to them and you try to force them to do something different because of your belief of what it good for them, you are coercing.
But based on your statements, I think that you consider a high level of authoritarianism to be normal.
Exactly. I was terrified my elderly mum would hurt someone with her car. Fortunately you can ask the State DMV to have someone take a road test. Which she failed. TG. It cost more to arrange for transportation (she lived in the suburbs) but totally worth the peace of mind. I do want to say, that was one piece of bureaucracy that I appreciated. She was a strong willed woman, so my telling here she couldn't drive was just a battle, but "Mom, you failed your road test, it's illegal for you to drive" worked. Hmm there is something a little coercive and underhanded in my behavior...
You should read up on how life is in small villages or prehistoric societies or tribes. Their day to day interpersonal interactions necessary for survival and hunter gathering would be naziism by that authoritarian standard. What my great grandparents did to each other on their farms would be tantamount to Soviet purges lol.
Significant levels of “coercion” are good between family and community members. If your husband is going to kill him self by drinking, you should not restrict yourself to being a wholesome non coercive person, you should try to stop it. It seems very cold to not try to stop people you are close to from seriously harming themselves just because that’s coercion. You shouldn’t let someone die just because they’re dumb! And if you want to use the “well cars kill other people” line, so does Covid! If your unvaccinated grandpa gets Covid from you and your kid, they’ll spread it to their bridge friends and kill them too! Wouldn’t you try a bit of coercion if your grandpa was getting scammed or something like that? We actually have the legal process of power of attorney if, for instance, a young woman is trying to seduce and marry an old, senile person to take their money. That’s not as severe as deaths!
Right!
Softer forms of "pressure" may be effective and appropriate, but hard ultimatums are almost certainly neither. When your unvaccinated aunt dies of COVID later this year, are you going to feel better about having never let her meet her grand-niece? Or, if she lives a long healthy but estranged life, vaccinated or otherwise, are you going to feel better for you and your daughter having absented yourselves from it?
Don't count on the fantasy scenario where she gets vaccinated and thanks you for the push and you all live happily ever after.
It's very odd to see an argument from feelings here. Especially missing the crucial difference in chance of the aunt dying from COVID with and without vaccination.
The chance of the aunt dying if she gets COVID while unvaccinated is maybe 10%. The odds of her getting COVID in the first place, are probably no better than 50%. And the odds of her getting vaccinated because of this sort of "pressure", are probably also no better than 50%. So with 95% confidence, the only question is what is the OP's relationship with their aunt in the interval between now and her previously-scheduled death from not-COVID. And a big chunk of the remaining 5% is, yes, the grief of knowing that the aunt died in spite of what the OP tried to do and died alone because of what the OP tried to do.
10% chance of death or even 5% chance of death is still bad!!!!
Some quick Googling says 2.2% of all deaths are traffic fatalities. Is that a high enough number of deaths to coerce relatives into never driving again? What would be a high enough percentage, in your view, to refrain from living the life you would otherwise want to live?
A 2.2% chance of dying over your lifetime for a critical activity is quite different from a 5% chance of dying in a six month period. And yes, if the risk of death from driving is much higher in less time, it is ethical - taking grandpas car away is sometimes justified, and there’s even a legal mechanism to make their drivers license get taking away if they fail a test.
> And the odds of her getting vaccinated because of this sort of "pressure", are probably also no better than 50%
This isn’t true, it depends on the situation. Some people can’t be and some can be persuaded. And you can often tell!
It's not necessarily a "fantasy" to insist on vaccination as a condition of socializing!
I told my high-risk parents that I would cancel my trip to see them in two weeks if they didn't get their second dose of COVID by the end of last week (they'd delayed it first by circumstances outside of their control, then laziness/red tribe contrariness set in).
I was firm but kind about my personal risk tolerance for infecting them now that Delta variant is surging. They decided they'd rather be inconvenienced by getting the second dose than miss out on a trip from me.
We're all good now, and my mom LITERALLY said, "Thanks for forcing the issue."
Thank you for sharing your perspective, I appreciate it. I haven't decided what to do yet, but your comment helped me realize part of why I'm stuck on this dilemma: I'm not sure I would be willing to enforce an ultimatum if I made one. If I were to go down that path, I'd have to be prepared to accept the outcome of not seeing my aunt in person for years, or possibly ever again.
Hm. You said you're the only remaining family member she's close to - is she actively estranged from everyone else? If so, were the estrangements her fault?
If yes, then she might indeed be the type to take such great offense for so long that you wouldn't see her again. You do have the option of walking back the ultimatum at any time, but if she's a difficult personality, she might indeed prefer to hold a grudge to the bitter end, even if you tell her you've changed your mind.
If yes, I'd like to point you at CaptainAwkward, a marvelous advice blogger. One of her dominant themes is to not surrender to the "But faaaaaaaamily!" argument, wherein blood relationships are to be preserved at *any* cost, no matter how unreasonable / disrespectful/ abusive / dangerous / cruel / etc the aggressor might be. C.A.'s argument is that boundaries are more important than blood; and those who don't respect reasonable boundaries are not and should not be entitled to close, loving relationships (unless they change and behave better). She has a lot of letters that cover negotiating "but faaaaaaamily!" situations and maybe even one about covid vaccine persuasion, although I can't find it right now and might have made it up.
But one of the biggest takeaways is that you don't have to tolerate the bad behavior of anyone because they're "faaaaaamily!" or lonely, or old. You wouldn't be at "fault" if your aunt took offense to your boundaries around baby handling and estranged herself from you.
But if none of that sounds familiar or would apply, and if you think your aunt would be mad but eventually "forgive" you - a new, 'nervous' parent, no less! - should you walk back the ultimatum, then it would seem to be worth the risk, at least from what little you've said.
It just depends on the kind of person your aunt is.
>is she actively estranged from everyone else? If so, were the estrangements her fault?
Ah, well, settling the question of who's at fault for what in my family would take somewhere between the length of a Captain Awkward column (I'm a big fan of hers btw!) and a decade of therapy. However, you've correctly spotted that one of the underlying issues here is that my aunt can be stubborn and unpleasant at times.
However, I do love her and appreciate many things about her. My objectives are to maintain the relationship between us--within appropriate boundaries--and to take whatever steps I reasonably can to get her to protect her own health.
Between your input and some other folks, I've been contemplating alternatives beyond what I had been thinking of as my two options: let her do whatever she wants vs. issue an ultimatum. Instead, I may wind up asking her not to visit this fall unless she's willing to get vaccinated, but offer as an alternative that the baby and I will travel to visit her in the spring. I had been thinking of doing this anyway, and at that point the baby will have been able to get many of their own important vaccinations, flu season will be past, and at the very least my aunt won't be taking on so much additional risk because she won't be the one traveling.
I really appreciate the time you've taken to explain your views and offer advice! This discussion has been very helpful in clarifying the issue for me.
Hey, your alternative seems like a great idea!
In addition to the advantages you listed of taking the baby to her, you'd also be going in (presumably) warmer weather, when COVID infections appear to naturally drop off, anyway.
Plus, newer babies aren't as cute and fun as older babies, who are more aware and interactive!
I think offering the choice between "see baby soon" (but vaccinate) or "see baby later" (don't have to vaccinate) is so fair that only a very grumpy, entitled sort of person would bristle at those options. I think even my opponents here would agree that if she gets offended by the boundaries of you offering two sensible choices in how to see the baby, she's the one who's out of line, not you.
I'd be interested to hear how it turns out! In the meantime, congrats on your upcoming baby!
Hail, fellow Captain Awkward fan!
It turns out my recall about a vaccine letter wasn't a memory, but premonition! LOL!
https://captainawkward.com/2021/07/26/1345-newborns-vaccines-and-visiting-relatives/
Wow, how incredibly timely! I love it :D
Consider the precedent you're setting, if you even hint that access to her nephew/niece can be used as leverage for you to get her to do something you want. *This* time it's something to do with your aunt's own health. Will it be next time, or the time after that? When she thinks that through -- and she will, she can't reach age 78 without having a lot of basic insight into the nature of human relationships -- will *she* conclude this is just a one-off, or the start of a discouraging and degrading trend?
There's a good reason we often put certain methods of leverage permanently off the table, with certain people, even if there's a very worthwhile immediate end that appears to justify this particular means, this time. We're saying "with you, I forswear certain means, no matter how important my immediate ends, because that preserves some important long-term trust between us."
Baby-handling practices before COVID *often* included wearing masks, being vaccinated, and washing hands before holding a very new baby.
Those were all reasonable practices then, and they're reasonable practices with COVID.
@edashwood is entitled to place whatever terms they feel necessary on when and how people visit with their new baby. If would-be visitors don't want to comply with mask wearing, hand washing, or vaccination, that's their choice.
She certainly is, but I am inviting her to think through the consequences first. Few people want to permanently alienate family members to whom they are close, and I think there is some slight chance of that -- people can feel very strongly about things like this (as perhaps the number and heat of the comments here rather demonstrates, and it's not like the baby is even related to any of us).
For that matter, the baby will grow up, and few parents want to disadvantage a child by alienating family on his or her behalf long before the child can have a say.
It might be different if the *baby's* health were at risk, but I am taking the OP at her word that her concern is the *aunt's* health.
I don't know if the baby will be very new, I am assuming not, since I thought the conventional wisdom was that a newborn should have no contact with anyone not in his immediate household for at least several weeks. That was certainly my practice, but then all my children were born in the last century so perhaps people are less worried now.
Thank you for the advice; I appreciate you sharing your perspective. I agree that the key difference here is whether I'm setting a condition for the baby's sake, or for my aunt's sake.
I do feel that I have the right--and truly the responsibility--to enforce whatever boundaries I decide are best for the health of my child. But in this case, that would only be the pretext. It would really be about enforcing a choice on my aunt over her natural inclinations. I would be doing it "for her own good", which feels quite different to me.
Well, good luck with the decision, and congratulations on the baby.
For what it's worth, if my adult daughter (she's about 32) were to attempt to pressure me on a subject which is this personal (my own health decisions) using access to my grandson as a lever, I would be really, really upset. It would be fine if she remonstrated with me, yelled at me, showered me with links to articles explaining what an idiot I was being not to get a vaccine -- children are entitled to be nags and pests to their parents, as sort of a karmic payback for all the steering we did to them when they were in middle school.
But reaching down into the murky instincts to something that is as fundamental as the desire to see the living proof that something of you will live on (in a descendant) as you are approaching the Big Darkness (which is pretty close at age 78) for me crosses right over the line, it's a form of manipulation that to me would feel not a whole lot different from threatening to withhold food and water, and however much my daughter cared about my health I trust she would consider certain methods of applying pressure simply off the table, out of respect for me as a person.
I don't know if that helps at all, because it's just my personal viewpoint, and certainly your situation will be uniquely different. The only thing I think I can say that's useful is to bear in mind that for the old, there can be, indeed must be, many things that are more important than sheer length of lifespan. Dignity and respect are high on the list.
Maybe one thing you can try is to have a frank conversation with her that is close to what you posted: "Aunty, I'm so worried about your risks with the new variants and all, I thought briefly of saying I wanted you to get vaccinated before you could see [baby name]. I decided that doing that was too unkind, or disrespectful to you, but just by the fact that I even *thought* about it should tell you how worried about you I am. Could you not please reconsider?" If my daughter said that to me, I'd just go get a vaccine so she would stop worrying, even if I thought they were useless or even slightly dangerous, because it doesn't degrade my sense of dignitity -- indeed, it's *elevated* because I'm doing her a favor, taking care of her, and I spent 20 years doing that and haven't left the instinct to do so fully behind.
Clearly I don't know how far away your baby is, but it might be worth factoring in to any calculation the time delays of vaccination: dose1 + 4weeks + dose2 + 14-21 days for effectiveness = 2 months, realistically.
I'm absolutely astonished by the other responses here.
You can and must enforce your personal boundaries around who gets to meet your baby, from "people who washed their hands right before holding the baby" to "people who have received X, Y, and Z vaccines." If you don't trust individuals to fully comply with your boundaries, you're absolutely entitled to watch them wash their hands, or see proof of a vaccine card.
You would not be "blackmailing" your aunt by kindly but firmly presenting your conditions for meeting your baby. On the contrary, she would be the one emotionally blackmailing *you* were she to insist on seeing your baby while violating your safety concerns.
Present your aunt your terms, and allow her the free choice to either accept your conditions or decline.
A hypothetical script might be:
"Hi Beloved Aunt, we're excited to have you meet Baby! Just to let you know, I [and Co-parent, if applicable], am/are following our doctor's instructions to not introduce Baby to anyone who doesn't have documentation that they've been fully vaccinated against [full list of vaccines]. We miss you and would love to have you, but we'll understand if you need to decline."
Keep the tone upbeat and loving, but be firm and don't negotiate. If she declines to abide by your terms, be loving, but regretful at *her* choice.
For what it's worth, I told my high risk 70-something parents that I would cancel my trip to see them in a couple of weeks if they didn't get their second COVID vaccine doses (delayed first by circumstances outside of their control, then laziness / red tribe dismissiveness) by the end of last week.
Those were my boundaries, to protect *myself* from the potential regret of knowing I had infected them by not doing what I reasonably could to protect them from the Delta variant.
Luckily, my parents prioritized seeing me over continuing to be lazy / dismissive. Now I can see them without worry, and they can be as protected as possible.
Gently tell your aunt your terms, and allow her to make the choice whether to comply with them or do without seeing the baby.
The person themselves says that the health risks for the baby is a relatively insignificant concern, compared to her worry for the aunt, which is perfectly rational given the risks of COVID to the elderly (high) and to babies (low). Vaccinations don't necessarily protect people from getting and passing it on either and they are less effective for the elderly. So if you really wanted to reduce the risk to the baby, a quarantine would be more logical.
You seem to not be addressing the actual concerns of the person asking the question, but what your own concerns are or would be. Yet you are not the person asking the question.
Also, your own experience deviates in some significant ways (your parents didn't seem to have significant resistance and you were the one traveling).
> Those were my boundaries, to protect *myself* from the potential regret of knowing I had infected them by not doing what I reasonably could to protect them from the Delta variant.
Yet the OP wouldn't be in this situation, because if the aunt were to be infected, this would most likely be along the way & it would be her decision to travel (and her actions, to make this happen).
The OP also gave no indication that she shares your reasoning/psychology.
The OP is contemplating an action I wholeheartedly endorse and successfully used myself on older, mildly vax resistant people (in a slightly different situation).
That means the OP at least shares *some* of my basic reasoning and psychology, otherwise the strategy never would have occurred to them.
I'm affirming that the OP should go with the instincts that made them contemplate this strategy in the first place, and I'm providing as much reasoning as possible to support them, especially given the (to me odd) majority of comments insisting that it would be literally morally wrong to place conditions on their next encounter.
Hosts place all sorts of conditions guests that come into their home, from whether they should wear their shoes inside to the amount of time they're willing to host them, to not letting the cat out of the house even if she really looks like she wants to go, to "please stay out of the dining room this afternoon while I have a confidential work Zoom meeting." And as a new parent, the OP has an especially acceptable cultural right to set and enforce conditions around handling the baby.
It's very possible the aunt would push back against another adult but compromise when there's a baby on the line, which would be the best situation for all involved.
And if the aunt doesn't want to compromise, the OP still always has the option of changing their mind.
> the OP at least shares *some* of my basic reasoning and psychology, otherwise the strategy never would have occurred to them.
Every normal person has that, because it is also the basis for parenting, as well as group norms. Wanting to control others because you think you know better than them, is not some weird desire. That doesn't mean you should necessarily act on that desire.
I can easily offer a different interpretation similar in kind to the one you made, but favoring the opposite behavior, by pointing out that by asking, the OP indicates that they have a feeling that this desire crosses a limit.
> majority of comments insisting that it would be literally morally wrong to place conditions on their next encounter.
It's not such a black/white situation. Some conditions are fine, but others cross the line. If you demand that your grandparents eat a couple of worms before they get to see their grandchild, they are presumably going to be quite upset and others will presumably be on their side (unless your grandparents are birds).
Typically, the conditions you place on family have to be somewhat reasonable in their eyes, or they may get very upset.
> And as a new parent, the OP has an especially acceptable cultural right to set and enforce conditions around handling the baby.
Again, the OP has indicated that this reason is very insignificant compared to the concern about the aunt. It comes across as a rationalization that wouldn't cause the OP to demand anything if the life of the aunt wasn't at risk. That you focusing on this, seems to be more of a case where you project your own feelings on the OP, than pay attention to their actual stated concerns.
> there's a baby on the line
If that would actually be the concern, then there are other options than just getting aunt vaccinated. In fact, getting vaccinated still leaves a risk of getting COVID and passing it on, so there is actually a safer alternative (a quarantine).
Demanding a specific solution by claiming it is for one reason, while you don't propose or even accept a solution that addresses that concern better, seems manipulative.
There are situations where manipulation is preferable, but it's a risky game, as well as not being particularly moral, when the other person is reasonably able to come up with their own preferences (for a normal human, so the standard is low).
> And if the aunt doesn't want to compromise, the OP still always has the option of changing their mind.
That doesn't mean that the consequences are undone.
The rest of your comment is great for perspective, but:
> I'm absolutely astonished by the other responses here.
Less of this please.
Fair enough, but I actually was genuinely astonished that *all* the people who had commented before I did were saying that it was literally morally wrong to deny access to a baby who would be at risk from not only COVID-19, but all the other stuff the OP said the aunt wasn't vaccinated for (flu, etc).
I just...I *really* wasn't expect that from this community of commentors, and when it was comment after comment with a suddenly completely alien worldview that didn't seem to value vaccines or boundaries...I was just actually astonished.
The question wasn't about the value of vaccines, though, and wasn't primarily about protecting the baby. If the baby's health had been the primary concern, I would have said sure, set whatever boundaries you want. Instead, the question was about withholding something from a relative to pressure them to do what you want "for their own good." That is indeed immoral, by my lights.
What percentage of risk to the baby would make setting boundaries around access to them moral?
The acceptable level of risk is for the parent to decide. Caution about a baby's health isn't what I object to. Like I said in my original response, if OP can honestly say that the decision would be for the benefit of the baby, it would be fine.
This is a response to your post below, but I'm going up one level with this response so the thread doesn't get too hard to read on mobile. The moral principle informing the distinction between OP's baby and OP's aunt is, simply, that the latter is a presumably mentally competent adult. In general, respecting other people means accepting the choices they make for themselves, even when we disagree with those choices - at least insofar as those choices directly affect the person in question.
It's perfectly reasonable to say that certain behaviors present a threat to oneself or those one has responsibility for (e.g. a baby) and set boundaries accordingly. When my friend had a baby in January of 2020 just before Covid hit, for example, he told me I had to get a flu shot before I could meet him, which otherwise I likely wouldn't have bothered doing, and that was perfectly fine. (Yes, I should have gotten one anyway, but I'm lazy.)
It's not reasonable or respectful to refuse to accept someone's choice on the grounds that a different choice would benefit them more. This is unavoidable for children and the severely mentally handicapped, but it's not how we should treat those who are capable of taking care of themselves.
It's even worse to claim that someone's decisions about their own healthcare are actually yours to make because you would be sad if they died or something. That's disingenuous, it springs from an impulse to control and manipulate, and it's very very close to being outright psychological abuse. You have no right to impose your prudential decisions on others. Their choices are their own.
Re. this question:
> Exactly how much does the ultimatum have to be for the benefit of the baby before it goes from unethical to ethical? 5%? 50% 80%?
Choosing an arbitrary percentage would be nonsensical. Imagine that the baby was your *only* concern, and ask whether you would still want to demand the vaccination then. You don't get to mix in any percentage of manipulating an adult relative for her own good. Answering this kind of hypothetical question honestly is very difficult, but it's what you have to do in order to treat all concerned with the respect and care they deserve.
Is it immoral to pressure a drug addict to stop doing drugs? Pressure someone who is killing themselves with something to stop? Really?
Probably depends at least a little on the probability of and severity of the consequences, and on the means chosen to exert pressure. Is it moral to blackmail an ex with publishing a BDSM sex video in order to prevent her from taking up skydiving?
This is a really good point.
Isn't the whole purpose of Al-Anon to help loved ones refuse to assist addicts engage in objectionable behaviors by developing strong boundaries and literally telling them, "I love you, but no."
My understanding is that refusing financial support, shelter, and even basic attention is all part of the Al-Anon toolkit. "I'll hang up the phone if you call me drunk," and "you can't crash on my couch until you've been sober for X amount of time" is totally normal, and not considered manipulative or coercive.
And that's understandable! It's just a reminder to step back when you encounter that. :-) Being willing to face alien mindsets while controlling for recoil is a lot of what makes this place what it is. This is especially so when on the modern Internet so many people get conditioned to “outrage first, questions later”, and surprise-as-territory-claiming is a very common thing.
FWIW, I think I agree more than disagree with you here in terms of actions, but I also can imagine where the others are coming from. I place a very high value on familial bonds and willingness to compromise for them, and much less value on being able to unilaterally set individual boundaries than you seem to (along the lines of: I consider it an important stopgap, but in many cases more like a weapon that you pull out as a last resort, not the first determiner of how interactions work; that's not universal though, and especially they come into play a lot more in less-iterated interactions and in certain other critical situations)—but I also consider the pandemic enough of an overriding concern that I would lean toward applying firmer pressure to vaccinate in this case, and I do consider the rings-of-concern to favor the closer kin over the more distant in case of dispute, and I think if the parent *already* had that as a hard line (and especially if it were already known to be such) then it would definitely not be immoral to enforce it. (Comparatively, what you were suggesting reads to me as “you *should* have that boundary”, not “*if* you have that boundary, then”.)
I don't think I would say this in *direct* response because my meta-considerations also involve “not everyone has the kind of family structure I expect”, so there's an “it's not for me to judge” there…
It wouldn't take an unimaginable amount of shift to make me think differently. And I certainly wouldn't consider those hypothetical other me to “not value” vaccines or boundaries—just to place them differently within the mix of values.
Ah - I definitely didn't intend to do " surprise-as-territory-claiming," I was just *that* amazed that there were at least half a dozen comments unilaterally stating that it would be immoral/unethical/blackmail for the OP to follow through with the ultimatum she was contemplating.
You're right, though, in retrospect, some of the insistent tone in my first comment was over-correction for what felt like an alarming consensus condemning a valid and reasonable tool for enforcing a personal boundary. Add in that the OP said she was more concerned about her aunt than her baby - but that the baby was still a concern, if a lesser one! - and it's hard to factor the baby back out of the equation. After all, it wasn't just the COVID vaccine the aunt hadn't received; it was a lot of vaccines, including the flu vaccines and maybe even DTaP. Some of those vaccines aren't on a baby's schedule until well past the age I would consider "new" enough to be part of a "new baby visit yay!"
But the OP mentioned that she might have the third option of taking the baby to see the aunt once the baby is sufficiently vaccinated, so that's probably the best solution all around.
The “there may be other relevant vaccines involved in this, based on the aunt's overall attitude” is actually a very good point which I hadn't considered—I notice now that you mentioned it more abstractly in your earlier post, but I had taken that as a hypothetical generalization of the described situation rather than something that might be directly applicable. So it's good that you brought that up more explicitly.
The 'blackmail' word was used in the original post. She(?) admitted later that she was mostly concerned with her aunts health.
As a side note, I'm really impressed with the 'moral quandary' help here. I've got a divorce on the horizon, with a bunch of emotions attached.. angry, pity, duty... and it would be great to get input from this crowd. I think I might have to make a more anonymous account though.
I don’t think the baby is at risk at all. But it’s totally justified to persuade the grandma to get vaccinated just for her.
And yeah, but ... rationalists. NAP > grandmas life ;)
Would you have been alright with milder language like "I'm surprised"?
With the caveat that I don't trust myself to extrapolate in a case here that's already occurred: I think so, but my response was also contextualized to the rest of the post following through on the strength of it—“you can and must”, etc. There's a fuzzy strength threshold at which there's a qualitative difference between “part of the natural reaction flow” and “implicitly trying to reset the accepted window”.
Thank you for sharing your experience with your parents, that's helpful to hear about. I haven't decided on a course of action yet, but one thing your comment illuminated for me is that my aunt--like your parents and many, many people--is not a particularly consistent or committed reasoner on this topic.
I wanted to keep the original post brief, but my aunt has said things that make me think she's avoiding the COVID vaccine more out of dismissiveness and annoyance than in order to be consistent with her principles. Her explicitly stated reason to avoid it is that it's not helpful or necessary (because it's not "natural"), but I don't think that paints the full picture. For example, she wasn't upset when I told her that *I* had gotten the vaccine. In fact, she even said something like "well, of course! You're pregnant, you can't take any chances!"
This comment, along with some others she's made, makes me think she might be more amenable to being "nudged" along than I would be if our positions were reversed.
Stupid phone browser. I wasn't able to see this response while I was typing my other one.
It doesn't sound like she's the toxic personality type I was discussing in the first part of the comment, so disregard that.
Just to simplify things:
Can you just blame it on your doctor? Like, actually ask their advice about a non-vaccinated person visiting the baby, and tell your aunt you have to go with whatever they said (which will likely be, 'only vaccinated or properly isolated people should handle the new-ish baby')?
It takes a lot of balls to get offended by a new parent just following doctor's orders.
Whoops. After this, no more phone browser replies.
I was saying, it takes an awful lot of balls to get offended over someone following a doctor's orders, and your aunt was supportive of you doing that in the past, so it seems like she might be supportive of it now.
Her not getting vaccinated is immoral, in my opinion at least an order of magnitude worse than emotionally pressuring someone into doing a beneficial thing.
Start by considering your framework. Is it acceptable to do a small bad thing to prevent a big bad thing? If not, then no you shouldn't pressure her to get the vaccine.
If so, then work out where you draw the line. Consider how many people she meets, and how likely she is to catch and/or spread COVID to others. Do the math, and decide if it's worth the price of feeling bad about pressuring her.
I'm curious about your definition of immoral (or criteria to consider something immoral). What makes her decision to not get vaccinated immoral? Would it be different if she were prone to allergic reactions or had some other reasoning behind not getting vaccinated? To jump ahead to possible future responses, what limiting factors do you consider before calling something immoral?
Getting vaccinated is extremely low cost, within rounding error of 0. It reduces the odds of inflicting significant pain on someone else by a large amount. In this case, benefit to other >>> cost to self. Therefore, failing to do it is immoral. This isn't a case where it's remotely close between the cost and the benefit. It's like if there was a button at your local pharmacy that you can press to save a life.
If you have an allergy or other health concern that raises the cost, then the comparison no longer holds and it stops being immoral to not get it. One reason why it is so vital that everyone who can safely get vaccinated does is to provide herd protection for those who can't.
For your follow up question, it's something that I don't have a clear answer to in most cases. In the vast majority of tradeoffs, the difference is small enough that I don't know how to judge ideals like self determination or respecting belief weighing against the benefits. I wouldn't support killing a healthy person to give their organs to other people, for example.
And to make another statement: I don't think that because something is immoral it should be legally required (You didn't say that I said this, but I'm addressing a common issue). I am very uncertain about how I feel about legally requiring vaccination in general, although I am more comfortable with requiring vaccination to engage in certain behaviors (e.g. I am fine with a stadium requiring proof of vaccination or health exemption as a condition for entering. I am uncomfortable with a state-backed mandate requiring you to get vaccination on penalty of fine or jail time)
If you choose not to pressure her one way or the other, keep in mind that OTC antigen tests are cheap, easy and reasonably accurate.
Yeah I don't like the idea of 'blackmailing' with the baby visit. Does she have a doctor she sees who can talk about risks and benefits of the vaccine... The biggest (individual) benefit I see is that even if you get it the outcome is less severe. Lower chance of hospitalization. I think it would be better for you to talk about your concerns for her, and not your baby... since it seems that is your real concern, and talking about the baby is kinda a sideshow. Congrats on the new kid! BTW.
replace 'your real concern' with 'your main concern'
1. The Dublin LessWrong group would be delighted to have you! Would be surprised if covid were too bad here, given that vaccine coverage is now slightly higher than the US and hesitancy is low. We are small though, I suspect it would only be worth your time if you have friends in Ireland you want to meet.
2. My favourite SSC post of all time is your book review of that book about Herbert Hoover. You need to make a sequel! I feel sufficiently strongly about this that if you write it, I will redirect my yearly donations to a charity of your choice :)
What would it even mean for me to write a sequel to that? Would I have to wait until Herbert Hoover does more things?
"Things I noticed on my second reading of the book about Herbert Hoover."
(just kidding)
Well, there are multiple times that you mention things that you didn't have enough time to mention, like the temple (?) and when he helped organise the WW2 food aid. You could also talk about how the author could possibly have come up with such wildly inflated estimates of Hoover's impact, and how his reputation was tarred by history etc.
"Hoover From Beyond The Grave: My Quest To Find A Reliable Medium" would be a fascinating jaunt and I'm sure *somebody* in Spiritualist circles *must* have tried communicating with the Great previously 😁
I guess I’m not the only wise ass on this blog.
Twover: Don't Call It A Comeback
Twist- it's a vacuum named Herbert who teaches microbiology or materials chemistry and becomes a wildly popular children's series in Ireland
Hi Sam when does Dublin LW meet? I'll be in Dublin next weekend (6-7 Aug) visiting my highly irrational but lovely poet mum and happy to connect IRL if anyone's around... St Stephen's Green?
Hello. Our July meetup is on the 31st, so August one probably won't be for another while. If you want to come to our online discussions, or you will often be in Dublin in future, I can add you to the groupchat?
For meetups, DC has been hosting them for a while. We've done them inside the last couple inside because DC is miserable outside in the summer, and there have been no issues. Numbers are down a little from the beforetime (~20 people instead of ~30). We're definitely in favor of more advertisement for the meetups, and if you're in DC you should definitely be coming! Sign up for the facebook group or mailing list here:
https://www.facebook.com/groups/433668130485595
https://groups.google.com/u/1/g/dc-slatestarcodex
If anyone holding meetups wants a place to post them, there is the (currently somewhat neglected) community forum on DSL here:
https://www.datasecretslox.com/index.php/board,8.0.html
Here are two posts on r/relationships, gender swapped, complaining that their partner debates them too much:
"My [25F] boyfriend [29M] of 1.5 years wants to debate EVERYTHING and always seems down to argue. It's making me not like him. Help?": https://web.archive.org/web/20210723234553/https://www.reddit.com/r/relationships/comments/421dab/my_25f_boyfriend_29m_of_15_years_wants_to_debate/
"My [28M] Girlfriend [27F] of 3 years will constantly want to "push" my values and argue all of them.": https://web.archive.org/web/20210723234726/https://www.reddit.com/r/relationships/comments/7e3fqv/my_28m_girlfriend_27f_of_3_years_will_constantly/
Commenters treat them fairly differently. Commenters are more forgiving of a woman doing it and view her motives as different. Eg on the debater-girlfriend: “[she] isn't interested in winning, she's interested in learning what you believe”, whereas on debater-boyfriend: “He wants to be the top dog. He wants to pick fights because then he can feel dominant. Content doesn't matter, he is trying to create situations where he feels strong... probably to compensate for something.”
Most commenters think the debater-boyfriend should be broken up with immediately or at least given an ultimatum. Debater girlfriend gets some mean comments (“She sounds insufferable to be around. I'm guessing she doesn't have a lot of friends”), but much fewer commenters recommend breaking up with her (that is famously quite rare for r/relationships, they are pretty trigger-happy about saying “dump the bitch/bastard”).
For me this is very interesting because I am very much the person being complaining about (hey, I’m on SSC!). Perhaps not entirely: I don’t *like* upsetting people, so I put effort into being more sensitive than is being described in these threads. And I don’t play devil’s advocate, unless a broad definition of that term is applied. So maybe I am or maybe I’m not like these people (though no-one's broken up with me about it).
Also, I want a relationship with someone exactly like debater-girlfriend. In my adult life, in all the relationships I’ve ended, lack of respectful disagreements has been a factor.
My model for both, which a fair few of the commenters go along with, is:
“Not everyone is interested in respectful disagreements. Many people who have opinions just want to keep those opinions, and to make statements but not have them be questioned, or only be questioned in a way that creates opportunities to affirm them. But some of us do; hearing that a person we like disagrees with us makes us eager to listen the reasons and find counter-arguments to them. It is a hobby, and as with any hobby, it can be frustrating for your partner to try to force you to engage in that hobby if you aren’t interested in it yourself. And it may indeed be the case that debate is just a status/class signalling exercise (again, just like other hobbies) but that does not change the fact that we learn a lot from it.”
Sometimes I worry like that that model is too blind to the way that status/control works in romantic relationships as opposed to friendships (most of my conversations with my platonic friends are debates). Many commenters on the debater-boyfriend thread are pretty opposed to the guy doing anything other than "having her back", which I think is sad.
But on the other hand, the debater-girlfriend thread exists. And I didn’t find that many other debater-boyfriend threads, so there might not even be that much gender disparity. Though I didn’t spend long looking.
I think the double standard is bad. They’re right that both of those people should break up with their partners, or not expect them to change. But it’s wrong that so many more of them say the dude’s behaviour is immoral than the woman’s.
I don't really see a double standard here. There is a similarity: both people are being described as wanting to argue too much. But the boyfriend is also described as being condescending, arrogant, and generally a jerk about it. The girlfriend isn't doing that. There are perfectly gender-neutral reasons to think the boyfriend sounds like a total asshat, and the girlfriend sounds like...someone who would be to some people's taste and not others'.
It's true, "condescending" is only applied to the boyfriend, and only he is said to have implied the posting partner is being boring.
On the other hand something that's said of the girlfriend but not the boyfriend is "she will sometimes randomly pull a controversial topic out of the blue and want to discuss it with me for a long time" - that is extremely edgelord and aggressive. Debating-girlfriend would do that if she wasn't herself quite bored.
It's a bit tricky because the complaining-girlfriend has more emphatic prose than complaining-boyfriend (all caps, exclamation marks, including on the quotes she uses).
Suppose a fake post was made which was an adaptation of the complaining-girlfriend's post, wording slightly changed to deflect suspicion. But gender-swapped. Would you expect the responses to be similar to what complaining-girlfriend's post got?
I don't see pulling a controversial topic out of the blue and wanting to discuss it for a long time as intrinsically aggressive. I suppose it could be, depending on how it was done, but the girlfriend is explicitly described as *not* having arguments just because she wants to win, but instead in a spirit of genuinely wanting an interchange of ideas and wanting to understand him better. Those are not bad motivations, even if it's too much and it's annoying. The boyfriend, by contrast, is using arguments as a bullying, dominating tactic. That makes a very, very big difference to how it feels.
I do suspect that you would see at least *some* double-standard if you swapped the genders, though, if nothing else because I bet some female readers would read their own bitter experiences with condescending and aggressive men into the description, even if it wasn't explicitly described that way. (I say this because I fear I might do that.) Still, I don't think a double-standard is what you're seeing in these actual posts.
"genuinely wanting an interchange of ideas [...] by contrast, is using arguments as a bullying, dominating tactic. That makes a very, very big difference to how it feels."
I agree but I think it's more complicated
"the girlfriend is explicitly described as *not* having arguments just because she wants to win"
It's not completely explicit. That is the interpretation many commenters have. But he says "She has always been really interested in debates and arguments and changing my views on things", and she's clearly "not dropping the conversation" a lot, in addition to the "apropos of nothing" controversial conversation.
That is consistent with her wanting to dominate. He isn't talking about her about her as if he feels it's that way... AND even if it IS that way, that's not the thing he's complaining about (he just wants to talk about other things).
There's subtlety here, because I think men are more likely to be doing it for domination - some amount of double-standard makes sense. I'm guilty of projecting onto the complaints about the debater-boyfriend too*.
Fundamentally I think the genuine interchange/domination is a good distinction, and we should go for the genuine stuff. But it's always possible to cast genuine interchange as domination (look on r/sneerclub). And we shouldn't forget there is always a bit of domination that motivates the discussion https://www.overcomingbias.com/2020/11/prestige-is-mob-enforced-dominance.html for example when someone's mind is change
*"He could argue about whether the sky is blue or cyan" - really, lady? Could he? Or could it possibly be the case that you found something he said to be splitting-hairs-ish, but it was actually quite key to showing that something you said was false, and you remember it as a dumb conversation in retrospect but you want to have some reason to be annoyed about his style, even though we know you participated in the disagreement at the time (because it takes two to tango!)
None of this bothers me because I DO have a double standard. I think women behave differently from men because that's their nature, as well as the reality of culture-driven gender differences. So I interpret actions with that in mind,
I'm very tempted to suggest that the two arguers should at least try meeting each other.
We would certainly see who "enjoys debating" and who enjoys winning a debate, in their own mind at least.
> Eg on the debater-girlfriend: “[she] isn't interested in winning, she's interested in learning what you believe”, whereas on debater-boyfriend: “He wants to be the top dog. [...]”
That part strikes me as somewhat reasonable. gender role incentives do shape the ways we play our social games.
A woke person can attribute it to patriarchal roles, a non-woke person can attribute it to innate difference between sexes, but either way the prior probability of a man doing something is different from a prior probability of a woman doing the same thing. Given different priors, receiving the same evidence should not lead to the same conclusions.
True! Wrong zoom-level on my part
Robin Hanson's wife declared that because of his penchant for argument, key decisions were just not going to be made based on that:
https://www.overcomingbias.com/2017/08/how-social-is-reason.html
It seems that Robin accepting that helped their relationship endure.
Cute!
Inapplicable for me because I never argue about decisions that actually affect me. If my partner wants something they tend to get it! If it's political/academic on the other hand...
That’s an old joke. A man is asked who makes the decisions in the relationship. He says the wife makes the minor ones, where to go on holiday, what to eat, where the kids go to school, what bills to pay and he makes the big decisions - whether we should have left Afghanistan, whether to lockdown again, how to deal with Putin and China.
I keep thinking about this joke and how you must have told it wrong, swapping "major and minor", because that's how it actually is. But maybe you didn't!
I think the joke is that the husband makes "big" decisions that don't matter because they're outside of the couple's control.
That's interesting. Come to think of it, I'm in a marriage of two people who are extremely good at arguing, and we don't seem to make any key decisions on the basis of argument either. Instead, it seems to be based on who is more significantly affected by the matter, or on who cares more. There's an expression of positions and then the person who cares less immediately recognizes that fact and gives way. That probably is wiser than deciding by argument.
Reddit advice is generally garbage anyway. I enjoy going on r/{AITA relationships relationship_advice} and laughing at responses sometimes. The GF’s post does say a lot more negative about the bf though which could be part of the cause, but the subs do tend to be more favorable towards women than men (very trad!)
> This can happen with any small minor thing, she just wants to know more and more about why I feel a certain way, and it gets annoying bc I don't even like to debate or argue or even think that much
Greta absolutely deserves better.
> This is a good example of how consent applies outside of sexual contexts. Tell her she needs to make sure she has enthusiastic consent from you before going into conversations that drain you.
-_-
European here (and from a country that got a pretty big COVID spike recently). I would go to an in person indoor meeting in september. I would be slightly more comfortable in October, but that's largely paranoia at this point (I think).
Definitely not irresponsible to hold or promote one at this point.
I'm looking for a fall sublet/rental in Washington DC for the fall.
Briefly about me: I'm a mid-20s male PhD student in Planetary Science, spending the fall working on space policy on capitol hill. I currently live in a group house (5 BR, 6 people) and I love it, so I'm hoping for something similar in DC. Lately I spend most of my time biking, and I like just about everything outdoors. I love baseball and theater, board games and card games. I really like to cook but wouldn't be surprised if I end up eating out a lot since I'll actually have access to worthwhile restaurants. I'm very respectful of common-space cleanliness (sometimes my own room gets a bit messier), and I like to think I'm generally quite easygoing.
Budget is a mildly-flexible $1k/month, and I'm planning to be around from mid/late-September through mid/early-December. I'd like to live somewhere that makes it easy to commute to work on the hill, so something on the red/green/yellow line would be good, and/or somewhere close enough to bike easily.
[I posted this in the previous open thread and on DSL, I won't post it again, sorry if this is already getting spammy, but I'm worried I got to the previous open thread too late]
Thoughts on Dominic Cummings, anyone? (If this was already in the discussion of the links post, I missed it)
I didn't follow me to closely, but to me it looked like
- Jan 2020: Cummings set out to transform the way the government works, see e.g. https://dominiccummings.com/2020/01/02/two-hands-are-a-lot-were-hiring-data-scientists-project-managers-policy-experts-assorted-weirdos/
- March 2020: covid hits and the UK screws up the initial response
- Nov 2020: Cummings quits / gets fired at no10
Whatever he tried to do within the government: is there some other interpretation than "he failed"?
I should add that I'm not interested in a heated debate our a shouting match. I was very skeptical of Cummings approach from the beginning and instead of being "told you so" I'd like to hear better takes on this.
> is there some other interpretation than "he failed"?
His framing now seems to be that he failed because he was up against Moloch itself. Trying to change a machine that's dead set on not being changed.
No idea what he's planning now, after that episode, but with his substack and everything it looks like he's up to *something*.
Popcorn, anyone?
You could go with the interpretation "he had a plan but Covid came too soon and caused too much distraction". If that isn't what you mean by "he failed".
I think the fairest interpretation is "Who knows?". In general, it appears that Cummings' aims were targeted at the Civil Service and its effectiveness, rather than broad policy. The Civil Service is opaque at the best of times, and with any changes likely to be long term in impact, it is both difficult and too early to judge.
> I was very skeptical of Cummings approach from the beginning and instead of being "told you so" I'd like to hear better takes on this.
Any attempts to significantly change government is going to fail 9 times out of 10 and circumstances matter so much, that failure or success can at most be partially attributed to the person who seeks to create change. Macmillan famously might have said that the greatest influence on his administration was: "Events, dear boy, events." And COVID definitely was an event. I don't see how any politician can reasonably be blamed for failing to create long-term change during the crisis. And Cummings wasn't even a politician with actual direct power, but an advisor.
Note that in his writings about his previous advisership, for Gove, Cummings identified the constant crisis management as one of the main problems. He noted that the media would assume all kinds of complex strategies behind what the government did, when it was often just a lower-ranked individual who made something up on the fly, which then became a scandal, where the government was utterly bewildered about what even happened. The result was that the government was constantly managing crises, without ever addressing structural problems, after a solid analysis.
Cummings has said several times that he considers himself to be short on important skills, but that he's mostly doing what he does for the lack of anyone better. I'd expect him to agree that he failed, but to argue that at least he tried.
Ultimately, there are different kinds of failure. You've got the failure where the job is easy and any failure is due to an error by the person, but also a failure where unpredictable and unavoidable circumstance have such an impact, that it is hard to imagine another outcome. I think that this is closer to the latter.
Not that I think that it would have been likely that Cummings would have succeeded without COVID, but now he didn't have a chance to get anything done of his own plans.
Not directly a thought, but I found this video to be very interesting and insightful into what happened inside the UK government during the initial COVID response:
"Former government advisor Dominic Cummings testifies to joint parliamentary committee"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8LFS3FaRs_s
(previously mentioned here: https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/open-thread-174/comments#comment-2083178)
Most insight into the UK government (or any government for that matter) I've gotten since watching Yes Minister.
His failure and exit from government weren’t really down to a failure of ideas or a failure to reform the UK state etc etc, it’s a much more boring reason - he fell out with his boss, the PM over office politics.
Unfortunately his credibility with the wider public and the political classes got shredded by his breach of lockdown rules - he drove the length of the country whilst infected - so his (in my opinion anyway) interesting critiques of the way the UK government functions will be lost.
"he fell out with his boss, the PM over office politics"
Strictly speaking, not even that. He committed one of the all-time classical blunders, only slightly more foolish than starting a land war in Asia: he got into a fight with the boss' piece over which of them had more control over him.
Too smart by half?
Or maybe the mistake was to think there's a shortcut in the long march through the institutions: the way to influence the PM is not to be their adviser but their PPE Prof.
both
After posting this late yesterday in "really tired but I want to get the question out"-mode, I had some time to think and read all the responses (thank's everyone!). Also, I had some time to look for the original Cummings blogpost I had in mind, which is this: https://dominiccummings.com/2019/06/26/on-the-referendum-33-high-performance-government-cognitive-technologies-michael-nielsen-bret-victor-seeing-rooms/
If you have some time, really read this one. It's like a blueprint of what you would like to do to prepare for crisis situations (like .. um 2020 but without knowing where disaster will strike?). I believe for various reasons that a deep dive on what happened would be interesting, but I don't have the time and background to do it myself. Instead, I'll lay my motivations out here for you to read. I hope someone bites the bullet and posts a long writeup here or on the subreddit.
So here are my various reasons for why I think a better understanding would be interesting:
- I don't think we can trust Cummings very much. Everyone can agree that he's a master at spin doctoring and no matter whether you like him or not, only takeing his word into account gives you probably a very skewed idea of what actually happend. I'd be motivated to read an honest post-mortem by Cummings of why his plans failed but I don't expect this to arrive any time soon (maybe in a few decades when all the dust has settled?)
- Looking at Cummings' original motivation, plans and the setting he got (a boss that defended and maybe even approved of all his eccentricness for more than one year?): I believe his failure in 2020 is reasonably strong evidence for scepticism on his approach of very lean and data-driven governing. In a polemic way: He had a year to prepare, then he was put to the test and failed to provide actual benefits - I can't see any case in the near future with better or even comparable starting positions to re-try this.
- I understand that Cummings has a very sceptical view of big government (I remember him somewhere on youtube arguing that the government would run more efficiently if you fired half the employees). My position would be a "Chesterton's fence"-view, arguing that bureaucracy has an important role that cannot be replicated or outperformed by lean/agile approach (whatever that means), so I don't think you an get away with this unless accepting major downsides. Instead of starting a heated debate on fundamental positions, I'd be more interested in a case study of how and where the Cummings-prefered lean approach can coexist with bureaucracy (as this would be the obvious solution to this dilemma). Now Cummings did provide one and I'd be intrigued to know more.
That said, looking at the previous responses, I'm not too optimistic. As far as I can tell, a few of us should've followed Cummings more closely (if you read the linked article above, you'll notice that he directly linked to SSC and Scott mentions his Substack in the last link post, so there should be some overlap, right?). Not getting any responses with what I'm looking surprised me and I don't really know what to think of it.
Cummings certainly succeeded in putting Barnard Castle on the map 🤓 he really shouldn't have lied through his teeth about that it made him a national laughing stock 😂
If you are interested in deepening your Stoic practice or learning more about Stoicism I co host a weekly zoom study group. We are working from this book. We just started week 2. Comment if you want an invite to the group.
A Handbook for New Stoics: How to Thrive in a World Out of Your Control―52 Week-by-Week Lessons https://www.amazon.com/dp/1615195335/ref=cm_sw_r_apan_glt_fabc_61F89Y0B266193J0V0HQ?_encoding=UTF8&psc=1
I would like an invite.
can you post your email for me please
Ok thank you! Another member will reach out to you through email.
Either no one has or it got filtered. Search for ”stoic” in my mail finds nothing. Is there another term I should search for?
its sent. sorry about that
I think I'm 50/50 on whether I'd be comfortable attending an indoor meetup in September. Case rates seem to be going down over the last handful of days, but it would be a lot of people and I think I'd have difficulty understanding conversation if we were masked.
(If I am comfortable going I'm the most likely organizer. We have an existing group "London rationalish" which used to be London LW before LW kind of died for a few years.)
Hi Phil - I'm happy to join that - just emailed you I think 🧐
I would be delighted to attend an in-person meet up in the US. Ideal would be a maskless meetup where everyone’s vaccination cards are checked at the door. Slightly less ideal is a maskless meetup with no vaccination checks. Even less ideal is a mask-enforced meetup but I’ll still attend one.
I consider it responsible to hold meetups in any countries where adults are able to walk into their nearest pharmacy and get vaccinated. So it’s fine in the UK but would be irresponsible in Mexico or Taiwan.
I'll +1 this rather than adding my own comment. I was scrolling down to see if anyone was of like mind with me.
I'm in the US; you can get a free vaccine at a Dodgers game (they even give you tickets for it). I think anyone who wants one can get one, and being vaccinated myself my concern about catching or spreading the virus is much reduced.
I also prefer no masks. I feel like I learned how much we depend on facial expression for communication during the long masking.
I sometimes thought about attending a meetup pre-pandemic, but never quite convinced myself to go. That degree of engagement is not going to push me over the edge into attending in a pandemic world. So, in a word, no.
I don't know what the covid data locally will look like in September, and I remain convinced that the PTB are choosing not to record things I'd very much like to know to judge actual risks. I can't predict how I'd feel about any indoor gathering of strangers that far into the future.
FWIW, I am currently visiting grocery stores in person, after a long period of getting groceries delivered instead. And I never stopped visiting medical facilities in person.
I am officially fully vaccinated, but my immune system was not at its best when I got the two Pfizer shots. I'm also 63 years old.
Probably I'm being overly paranoid, but OTOH, I'm an introvert; I don't really mind interacting with strangers only outdoors.
FWIW, my employer ratcheted back its demand for in-person work starting at the beginning of September; it's now holding off until October. And I'm currently off work on disability, contemplating retirement rather than return (NOT because of covid), so this is a data point rather than a concern.
My concern is primarily with the unvaccinated breeding new and improved variants that break through vaccinations more readily, but secondarily with data not being gathered on breakthrough cases, leading me to mistrust those who, having chosen not to collect the data that would provide evidence for their assertions, now assure me that I'm perfectly safe.
I had terrible food poisoning a few months ago, the worst I've ever had, from some leftover chicken. I decided to stop eating chicken forever as a result (so far, so good). It's an idea I had entertained for a while, for ethical reasons, but the misery I experienced gave me a renewed appreciation for suffering, and between the desire to not experience it (probably avoidable by just being more discriminating with leftovers) and to not inflict it, I got over the hump and made a decision I feel good about.
It's a pretty major part of most religions, but experiencing suffering really is necessary, for many or most people (including me) to really take suffering as seriously in decision making as its moral weight demands.
Somehow this seems obvious now, and much less so before I was sick. I wonder if we've become so distanced from suffering that much of our (the average Western person's) moral philosophy has been built entirely upon higher rungs of Maslow's hierarchy, resulting in some odd ideological conflicts.
I can definitely relate to this—but at the same time it very much seems like our culture has become *much* more sensitized to suffering, and much more motivated to prevent/not inflict it, as we’ve become *less* surrounded by it due to the medical revolution/Great Enrichment of modernity.
One of the big important lessons to be learned from suffering a bunch is that suffering is not that big a deal. Safety produces fragility; you can't possibly believe that misgendering is a serious issue if your job is to sweep mines in Cambodia.
I agree. Suffering is important and the other side of utility / pleasure / good, and pondering it is important.
But if fate had given you salmonella from lettuce instead, that wouldn’t have really matched your ethical precepts.
I have been thinking a lot about this, especially with some of the discussion here regarding PTSD. Plus I've been re-reading Vietnam War novels (Matterhorn and Fields of Fire) and thinking about this. My grandparents were children in the Depression, then saw all kinds of horror and experienced real suffering in WWII. (My grandfather was at Pearl Harbor, my other grandfather in North Africa and Sicily.)
Point being, my life has been easy, and my children have even more comfortable lives. But I think we're less likely to give active service to other people, less happy, more prone to mental illness, etc. Maybe we just missed the chance to suffer for something we believe in.
I'm also a believing Latter-day Saint, and in that tradition we honor the suffering of our pioneer ancestors, many of whom died on the way to Salt Lake. We also promise to follow Christ, who is the archetype of suffering (and the overcoming of suffering.)
I certainly don't think we should invite suffering, but I think we ought to sacrifice something. It's something I try to teach my children in small ways. For instance, Mormons fast once a month, and I encourage my children to participate in that. Being hungry is good for the soul.
I very much relate to this. I had quite bad food poisoning 5 times from fried chicken (4 times from KFC alone!).
Fried chicken is by far what I miss most as a vegetarian, but recalling the many instances of food poisoning is one of the easiest ways to give me additional strength here. Well, that was more useful early on in my vegetarianism. After over a decade meat has stopped registering in my mind as an option that is selectable (which is great! I wish I could do this for more things I don't want to do).
Let's say I want to approach Chaos Magic from a rat angle.
Anyone already taken a look and can recommend a place to start? Or got a take on whether it's worth exploring?
IMO this is like “let’s say I want to approach hermetic mysticism from a scientific materialist angle” lol
Definitely. LOL!
Well the idea of CM seems to be just doing things that work, regardless of your epistemics.
"Chaos magic thus takes an explicitly agnostic position on whether or not magic exists as a supernatural force, with many chaos magicians expressing their acceptance of a psychological model as one possible explanation."
An obvious point is that you require good epistemics in order to figure out which things work and which doesn't.
Yes. Though that can be emulated with a scientific approach
My impression is that Chaos magic (or magick, if they want to be extra about it) would be very open to such an angle, as their position (from what I can see) is "What works, works; why it works, we aren't hung up on that".
So if you want to invoke the Great And Dread Mickey Mouse in a working, you go! (so long as you are certain you are well warded from the Lawyers).
The problem being everyone thinks what they do works, because they’re doing it, so CM can just take sentences with literally no meaning like “thinking things makes them happen!! Think you’ll get money you’ll get money!” and then use usual woo nonsense to get individuals to believe it, and then because it “worked” they used epistemologically agnostic rationalist methods!!1!! The actual content of Chaos Magick is basically a twist on The Secret but with cool aesthetics.
Sounds like a massive steaming pile of placebo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wdVh0bZ5KkM
The steelman of Chaos Magic would be something like: rituals or symbols have psychological impact on us, let's reseach which forms have the greatest impact. Like, if you have some goal, and you believe that being reminded regularly of the goal would increase your chance of actually following it, then it would make sense to make a symbol representing the goal and put it on a visible place.
I guess it would be similar to placebo research. As far as I know, people found out that larger pills have stronger placebo effect than smaller pills. (As usual, not sure whether this finding survived replication.) Maybe we could find out that some symbols have stronger effect than some other symbols, too.
CM as placebo research seems apt. A more "practical" version of NLP / Hypnosis, perhaps.
NLP is entirely fake. Hypnosis is just weird and larpy but I doubt it has much to do with the other stuff
CM is complete wootherapy meaningless word salad though. If you wanna explore ritual, do ... actual ritual. Figure out how to factor out the Xtianity from the Latin Rite and make a Nrx Rite or Church of Yud Prayer something. Resurrect a Roman cult.
"Figure out how to factor out the Xtianity from the Latin Rite "
I am biting my tongue *so hard* about this in order to repress my first snarky response, as that would be an ecumenical matter. So sticking with goring my own ox, there are plenty of the TLM/SSPX types who would tell you that the Novus Ordo already has done that 😂
I’d love more snark! And I still to an extent don’t get the point of speaking in Latin to people who don’t know it. But I really mean to keep the aesthetic ritual part without the Christian part - then again, just say a prayer to Jupiter in Latin, nobody will be able to tell.
If the Novus Ordo options are chosen to maximize its similarity to the TLM then Catholicity is certainly not factored out. But no one says the NO ad orientem and in Latin, along with a number of other things. Even though they could and should.
You know, the first time I read this I didn’t expand rat to rationalist. It read really funny that way. Had to look up Chaos Magic. Are making a joke anyway? Sometimes I’m pretty sure people are pulling my leg.
Sometimes you're right. But when?
Thanks for the giggle Nancy
Not a joke, I think there's huge potential value in placeboing oneself
Thanks Meta. It’ll take me a little time to internalize a new verb. So I’m just going to keep my mouth shut for the time being.
From a rat perspective, it might look like this http://www.ratbehavior.org/perception.htm 🐀
"Magic is the art of causing changes in consciousness to occur in accordance with the will."
Think about all the ways that can happen and you'll be approaching magic from a rational angle.
True, but also pretty broad. Pretty much every willful act changes consciousness
I just listened to Lex Fridman interview Bret Weinstein and found the Weinstein's views on vaccination inconsistent and frustrating. Here's a brief summary:
1) He thinks we still have an opportunity to eradicate SARS-Cov-2 and should try to (I agree).
2) He has concerns about the possible effects of the mRNA and even the viral-vector vaccines. A steelman of his concern goes something like: "Because both the mRNA vaccine and the viral-vector vaccine are narrowly targeted at the spike protein, it does not provide as good immunity as real infection. In addition, this narrow focus introduces selection pressure on the virus to mutate. If we had deployed the virus before the pandemic was raging, it would be a different story, as the virus would not have an opportunity to reproduce with that selection pressure."
I disagree with this -- why does he not have this concern for other widely used vaccines, such as the flu, the measles, or other viruses that are already with us? I've read estimates that the vaccine is likely more effective against variants than natural immunity (partially because the dose is quite large), but admittedly the data is early. More to the point, many more studies reliably show that >99.95% of people hospitalized for COVID did not take the vaccine, and I presume some percentage may have been infected before.
3) He has a concern that the vaccination may induce antibody-dependent enhancement, making a later infection worse than it would have been with no infection. I am not aware of _any_ evidence showing this, if someone knows of some, could you kindly link it?
4) He feels it's borderline unethical to vaccinate children because they fare so much better than older people. I think a steelman would be "Our goal is herd immunity, not necessarily vaccination. We should let children develop her immunity naturally because so few children have problems getting COVID". It seems to me this argument directly contradicts his first point, which is that we should try to eradicate the disease. Eradication is more likely the more quickly we increase overall immunity, and vaccinating children helps this.
Am I off in my analysis of this?
I haven't heard the arguments, but perhaps it's easier to evolve to evade a vaccine targeting the spike protein only (as only the spike protein needs to change) than a vaccine containing the entire virus, or all parts of it (a traditional attenuated or inactivated virus vaccine).
There are many traditional vaccines that also only use viral subunits rather than the whole virus: https://www.niaid.nih.gov/research/vaccine-types
It might well be, but the problem (for the virus) is that the spike protein has to match up rather closely with the human ACE2 receptor for the virus to make entry to the cell, so that puts pretty stringent limits on how far it can evolve before it not only evades the immune system but fails to bind effectively to the ACE2 receptor.
(Uninformed speculation:) Some other coronaviruses (SARS v1 and a common human coronavirus) also bind to the ACE2 receptor, but I'm unaware that there is significant cross-immunity.
Also, I assume that something naturally binds to this receptor, so if we created immunity against anything that binds to it, we'd create autoimmunity.
(The terminology is confusing, as a layman. ACE2 is a protein. I assumed that ACE2 was what binds to an ACE2 receptor. But if I understand correctly, ACE2 is actually the receptor itself, and I don't know what binds to it. It seems like when they say X-receptor, X can be either the molecule that constitutes the receptor itself, or the molecule that binds to it.)
I remember hearing him argue that the spike protein itself was harmful, so that would explain why he was so against mRNA vaccines, but I wasn't clear on why he would treat the other COVID (viral vector) vaccines differently from what we used prior to COVID. And I don't know if there are any in development of the sort he's said he's waiting for.
The claim (and pointless as usual FactCheck, with little real information, but correct in this vaze) https://www.reuters.com/article/factcheck-vaccine-safe-idUSL2N2NX1J6
Against it, from google:
http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:https://medium.com/microbial-instincts/biodistribution-and-spike-protein-safety-of-mrna-vaccines-an-update-788fe58e39b9&prmd=ivn&strip=1&vwsrc=0 (This is a good way to archive and paywall bypass it seems) - archive.org, outline.com, reader view didn’t work
https://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2021/05/04/spike-protein-behavior
It seems somewhat convoluted and not understood in detail tbh, but intramuscular vaccine vs vaccine in lungs and the spike protein being produced a lot by the virus vs less vaccine seems like a win for the vaccine safety.
If I was to baselessly speculate, what happens to the ionizable lipids that make the nanoparticles in the body? Where do they go? Are they excreted? Do they stick around? That seems like one of the few “safety concerns” I can come up with that isn’t facially stupid. However they already chose said lipids to not be toxic, and it’s probably fine, and anyway if there was much bad we’d probably have seen it already with 100M vaccinated. Interestingly, the lipid nanoparticle isn’t like a lipid bilayer surrounding water with rna, but instead a nanoparticle of solid lipid and rna, at least according to a Derek Lowe commenter.
As far as I can tell skimming through the painful English translation of a Japanese study on the pharmacokinetics of ALC-0315 that apparently was part of Pfizer's application for approval, the half life is about a week, and it mostly concentrates in the liver (of course), and the key degradation step seems to be hydrolysis of the two ester links holding it together. The resulting (somewhat peculiar) fatty acids might be further metabolized by any number of metabolic processes, e.g. beta oxidation, or perhaps they are now soluble enough to just be excreted directly in the urine.
I forgot to add:
5) He recommends people who have not yet had the vaccine but have had COVID take Ivermectin, due to some studies (small and inconclusive, I would argue) showing promise as an antiviral. I don't know enough here to have a high confidence on a view, but I guess I'm not aware of evidence that vaccination of those who have had COVID-19 has been a problem. Can anyone point me to information on this?
Between 2 and 5 peeps per million people vaccinated have serious adverse (i.e. hospitalization) side effects. Ivermectin studies are not very solid (but they are suggestive). But is it better to vax and avoid infection, or not vax hope that Ivermectin can keep you from dying. To vax or not to vax? that is the question. Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer the slings and arrows of innumeracy, or take arms against a sea data, and by analyzing them end doubt.
I guess in his case he already had COVID, so he believes the natural resistance is good enough. What would you say to this argument?
Post infection antibody titers aren't as high as post vaccination antibody titers. Your titer mileage may vary...
Vaccines often provide better immunity than natural infection, e.g. due to the use of adjuvants. I don't know that much about the Covid vaccines, but the people who developed them must have been aware that coronavirus immunity is typically short-lived, so there would have at least been a motivation to try to boost immunity beyond the natural level.
Er, that should read "deployed the vaccine" not "deployed the virus". We need an edit button.
> Because both the mRNA vaccine and the viral-vector vaccine are narrowly targeted at the spike protein, it does not provide as good immunity as real infection
Pfizer moderna and many others have MUCH better immunity than other vaccines we still use f.ex. the flu, so this is not a good criticism
> In addition, this narrow focus introduces selection pressure on the virus to mutate
Immunology is hard. Statements like this are often just untrue, no matter how good it sounds. Unless he backed this up with a lot of evidence (and a few study abstracts that sound good is not a lot of evidence) then it is meaningless. “Immunology is where intuition goes to die”. That said, I am not an immunologist, so it’s possible, but as a general statement it seems off.
3 again same, possible but it’s just a random idea without very good evidence. You could make similar random cases that people getting the virus would be worse because immune response is stronger which induces harder selection pressure to mutate; and more people getting it means more mutations and less bottlenecks in spreading. Which is also unsupported!
So yeah, but also his other points are ridiculous too - ivermectin does not have good evidence that it works, existing evidence is well within the spectrum of past drugs that have disappeared (azithromycin, hcq, but the real comparison is just drug development in general). Many of the other stuff he says Covid wise is crankish as well.
So yeah agree
Ummm...
re #2 — Sorry, but vaccine induced immunity (in most people) produces much higher serum neutralizing antibody levels than an actual SARS-CoV-2 infection — this has been derived from antibody titer levels of the post-infected vs the post-vaxxed. If you insist upon a link, I'll dig for it in my 500+ COVID-19 bookmarks (Arrrgghhhh!).
Plus, most of the mutations in SARS-CoV-2 are in the spike protein (suggesting a selective pressure to make it the RBD and FCS regions more infective. There have been some mutations in other regions of the genome, but those don't seem to affect infectiousness or resistance to the antibodies.
re #3 — yes, that's a theory. However, I'll point out at the B.1.617.2, P1, and B.1.351 variants, which are the most common variants today worldwide, all recently developed in countries with low vaccination rates (India, Brazil, and South Africa respectively). I don't think the data supports his fears.
re #4 — Delta (B.1.617.2) is sending younger cohorts to the hospital (presumably because the viral loading levels ramp up fast, and this increases the infectivity, but also triggers cytokine storms in younger people (data preliminary, though). But even if you vaccinate all adults, theoretically the virus will evolve to use kids as the host. Personally, once the safety data is in for kids under twelve, I'm all vaccinating them (unless the data shows there's an abnormally high incidence of adverse effects).
Also, herd immunity may be a myth with a Coronavirus like SARS-CoV-2. I discussed it above.
Thank you for this reply, I will read more about the topics you mention in its genome and if you do find the articles it'd help much. Thanks.
If you have some genetics under your belt, you might find these to sites to be useful...
At https://outbreak.info/ you can enter its Pango lineage identifier (i.e. B.1.1.7, B.1.351, etc.) under the Variants search section and get report on the mutations on which part of the virus they occurred on. The S section is the spike protein...
https://outbreak.info/situation-reports?pango=B.1.617.2
There was a neat way to line up these mutation charts for all the lineages side by side, but I can't figure out how to do it right now. Anyway, it showed that most of the mutations were taking place on the spike protein or near the spike protein. And the same mutations were happing in different combinations for different lineages.
Nextstrain dot org gives you a great lineage tree that shows you every variant and sub-variant that's been detected so far.
https://nextstrain.org/ncov/gisaid/global
Covariants dot org gives you some good summary info on the variants. If you click on a particular strain, it takes you to the cov-lineages dot org website that gives you a detailed breakdown on the history of its spread....
https://covariants.org/
https://cov-lineages.org/
There's another argument from Weinstein-- that mRNA vaccines don't have a long history of safety, so there could be side effects we don't know about.
I mean you could make that same argument about any new adjuvant or vaccine manufacturing type. Which is interesting, but I don’t see it as any newer of a risk than other new non mRNA vaccines. Where’s the risk from - the LNP constituents? Modified RNA nucleotides? Other stuff in there?
I *think* it was being uncertain about how the nucleotides would interact with the immune system.
As I recall, Weinstein thought it was a good bet for his and Heather's parents to be vaccinated (I don't know which vaccine), but he and Heather(?) were trusting to ivermectin.
Which is one of the reasons the FDA, depending on who you listen to, is either (a) dragging its feet or (b) being necessarily cautious before it grants full approval for any of the vaccines. My understanding is that vaccine approval is normally a three-year process. But this is the first time that we've faced a pandemic since the FDA established this process. So we'll see what happens.
The Johari Window was applied to risk analysis specifically to deal with the known unknowns. In the 2-by-2 matrix of known and unknown in a formal risk assessment, the outcomes of past events are frequently used to create an estimated probability for known unknowns to happen (all very Bayesian). The unknown unknowns are generally not allowed to affect the risk assessment because they're just unknowable until they happen. It sounds like Weinstein is just fretting about the unknown unknowns...
I agree he's fretting about unknown unknowns. If there turns out to be something wrong with mRNA vaccines, that will affect rather a lot of people.
I think it's unlikely that mRNA vaccines will turn out to be worse than COVID.
Apparently ADE is something that happens across strains. If you catch Dengue virus, for example, you're immunized against the strain you caught, but another strain may hit you harder than it otherwise would have. It's also not well understood, but it's known to happen in feline infectious peritonitis virus (FIPV), a coronavirus that infects cats. From a year-old Nature article:
"Second, because ADE of disease cannot be reliably predicted after either vaccination or treatment with antibodies—regardless of what virus is the causative agent—it will be essential to depend on careful analysis of safety in humans as immune interventions for COVID-19 move forward."
It seems obvious that there's not any ADE now, but I suppose that in the future a variant could emerge that hits the vaccinated harder than the unvaccinated.
I'm not sure I agree that this is a reason to slow vaccination, though. The best way to prevent a new strain from emerging is to vaccinate as many people and as quickly as possible.
Interesting. Is this the article you're referring to?
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41564-020-00789-5
Follow up... I never heard of ADE until recently when I heard this as an argument from an anti-vaxxer, so I didn't bother to follow up on it. Since you've brought it up, though, I'll now classify it as one of the known unknowns about vaccinations in my own personal Johari risk matrix. I did a read-thru the article that I think you referenced, and if I understood the process correctly ADE happens in a couple of scenarios where antibodies with suboptimal sterilizing abilities preferentially bind to the virus, and then the virus evolves around the antibodies and makes a successful attack on the host cells.
Well it's been 22 months since the nCoV19 variant appeared in China, and almost a year since that article was published, and in the meantime over 1 billion doses of various types of vaccines have been administered worldwide. If an ADE scenario were going to happen, the selective pressure of vaccines would have almost certainly made it happen by now. So the current evidence doesn't support Wheatley et al's argument.
Regarding #4 - the vaccines do not seem to eradicate the virus. Significant numbers of people who have been vaccinated do get infected, though the severity is lessened. If our goal is the eradicate the virus, the the vaccines do not appear to be sufficient to do so. Given that, it does make more sense to view children (or any sub population that is very unlikely to be significantly harmed by the virus) individually, to review pros and cons.
That the vaccines aren't 100% effective against infection doesn't imply that they can't eradicate the virus. Even without being 100% effective, vaccinating most people could reduce the transmission rate below 1, which could gradually lead to the extinction of the virus.
The main barriers to eradication are that it's probably unrealistic to vaccinate a sufficient percentage of the population throughout the world, and possible animal reservoirs.
But even if eradication is unfeasible, it's plausible that vaccinating children is useful for minimizing outbreaks.
1) Yeah, but when I watched a 3-hour video with Bret, twice, he seemed to think the way to do this was via prophylactic ivermectin and other sources indicate that the evidence for a prophylactic effect is weak.
2) So, I put up a LW thread about the 3-hour video and eventually noticed, weeks later, that the biggest (but still hand-wavy) piece of evidence they offered for the danger of spike proteins, ovaries concentration, is somewhere between "highly misleading" and "pants-on-fire lie" depending on how it is phrased: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/7NoRcK6j2cfxjwFcr/covid-vaccine-safety-how-correct-are-these-allegations
I was skeptical of the "vaccines killed tens of thousands of Americans!" claim from the beginning. Not only have I seen no evidence against my intuition about the source of the VAERS deaths, but also Steve Kirsch's claim that Covid vaccines "likely killed over 25,800 Americans" was retracted as incorrect by Austin G. Walters (who AFAIK was the one who originally made the claim).
Another interesting thing I learned was that one of the foremost promoters of ivermectin, Theresa Lawrie, is also behind some really weak anti-vaccine analysis touted by Bret that basically just tallies up side-effect reports and says "you see?? you see?!!" https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/7NoRcK6j2cfxjwFcr/covid-vaccine-safety-how-correct-are-these-allegations?commentId=Ct3pvsqWhQhsYGcAo
3) In the same video, Dr. Malone says to Bret that "all of the prior attempts to develop human coronavirus vaccines have failed due to ADE.... The [interesting thing] about the current ones is they are showing so much efficacy ... I was watching for an ADE signal, I'm not seeing it".
4) I agree that herd immunity should be the goal and I am concerned that putting vaccinated people together with unvaccinated Covid carriers would help promote vaccine-resistant Covid mutations, if any should arise. (Alberta is doing this: they are lifting the requirement for people with Covid to quarantine, and no longer recommending people get tested for Covid. Has the Conservative government been watching too much Bret Weinstein?)
Thank you for doing the work.
Are the hidden open threads better? Is there more discussion (people responding to comments).
Pretty much the same as far as I can see, but there are fewer trolls (because trolls don't seem to want to become supporters).
There’s a lot of discussion on non hidden open threads, just not necessarily on the comments you want. Plenty have very deep (comment tree depth) discussions.
Well you could always subscribe and find out (entice, entice).
I think they're pretty much the same as the open threads, but it's hard for me to be ruthlessly coolly objective since I like fairly much all the content available on this joint.
Boy, I could afford it I guess but 10 bucks a month to NPR to PBS to NYT to Washington Post to the local newspaper to Amazon music streaming etc. Then start adding 10 bucks for Scott’s blog, Freddie’s blog… Let’s just say I’m considering my options at this point.
Maybe a tote bag incentive would help. [joke]
Freddie only charges five. I think ten is a little much, but then I pay it . . .
I was thinking that the small blue circular gizmo at about four or five o’clock on the user ID photos indicated subscribers. I guess not.
Okay I zoomed in and see it’s a pen. Substack authors?
People who support the given substack at a higher than base rate.
I cohost the Affix podcast (https://www.affix.live/), a two-dudes talking style podcast focusing on articles/books commonly discussed in this community. Probably the most similar podcast I can think of is Very Bad Wizards, but we're much less academic. I don't really want any monetary support, but would really appreciate getting some constructive feedback on what we're doing.
I also cohost the Affix podcast.....
Perhaps you could try different accents for different episodes... French, German, New Jersey.
Accents aside, I've listened to a handful of episodes while cleaning and watering my plants. It kind of feels like hanging out with you guys, which has been a pleasure. If I had to give constructive criticism, it can be a bit too tame. You both come across as very even-keeled which is good for rationalism, but can be a bit one note. So, perhaps there may be some welcome drama in pushing yourselves out of your comfort zones.
How? I'm not sure. If it was up to me, I'd suggest a "First Principles" segment, where you approach an idea with a blank canvas. No priors. Just an exercise in fresh thinking. Almost like a game of taboo, where you're not allowed to lean on precedents.
For example: "imagine a new system for learning". Disallowed terms: classrooms, students, curriculum, teachers, homeschooling...
Thanks, appreciate the feedback! Playing it tame is a good call out.
I wanted to jump on to that thread in the last comments free-for-all about PTSD. I won’t go on and on about it but it intrigued me, and the first thought I had was (just sort of trying) to imagine what was culturally “normative” in those times. If anyone’s interested in pursuing it I would love to talk about it more.
I would attend an outdoor gathering (even though it may well be cold where I live by September). I am not sure whether I would attend an indoor gathering.
I’ve been meaning to get the Philadelphia meetup running again, starting with rebranding our Google Group as ACX Meetup. We had been meeting at my home under our spacious covered porch for much of 2020, but suspended the meetup last December as cases skyrocketed, besides it being too damn cold.
I would have started up again already, but we had a baby in May. Given the shape of things currently, I’d like to continue hosting on my porch. I’ll consult my co-organizer and we’ll pick a date in the next few weeks for the revived meetup.
Congratulations on the baba! How are things going there?
Baby is great. And if you meant our region, we’ve got a high vaccination rate and still quite a lot of mask compliance, so I feel OK hosting events at my house.
I meant the baby and yourselves, having a new baby is a lot and then a pandemic on top of that is even more of a handful. But if you're all thriving, then that's great and good luck to you all!
Congratulations!
I'll be at the meetup.
Non-sequitur, but how do you like Philly? Just went to a deeply Catholic wedding there and was wondering what it would be like to live there as myself/very much not a Catholic and thought this city probs doesn't have a rationalist community but there is a lot of biotech-
I live in Philly. I like it here.
My only difficulty from not being a Catholic was the time when for some reason I wanted to know what parish I'm living in, and I had a hard time convincing the person I was asking that it could be a real question.
From google, I don't know where they got the numbers.
Protestantism (41%)
Roman Catholicism (26%)
Jehovah's Witnesses (1%)
No religion (24%)
Judaism (3%)
Islam (1%)
Buddhism (1%)
Hinduism (1%)
So I just learned in the past week or so that there's something called the 'non-accelerating inflation rate of unemployment' or NAIRU, and I was a little blown away and horrified. As far as I can tell, this is an implicit promise that central banks will increase the cost of capital in order to deliberately make people unemployed. Isn't this really bad? If this is somehow necessary for the economy to function, how can societies justify making unemployment such a terrible experience?
> Isn't this really bad?
Unemployment, on an individual level, isn't bad, unless you are either (a) don't plan ahead and hence don't have any savings or (b) are unemployed for a long time.
Spending a month or two unemployed between jobs, or just after entering the workforce, is normal and natural.
Some people don't make enough money to have savings.
Almost everybody makes enough money to have savings, roughly in proportion to their normal living expenses. Conversely, spending more money than you earn is a thing rich people do almost as often as poor people. The difference isn't that one group can save and the other cannot; the difference is that the rich have *credit*, which can save their sorry asses if they don't save.
Also, assets that can be shielded via bankruptcy.
All well and good for someone who has a good enough job to save but I know that there's plenty of people living week to week that will also lose their jobs. This is bad.
That whole “don’t plan ahead” thing doesn’t mean anything when you don’t earn enough to save. In the US where lots of educated people are usually throwing all their surplus income at loan payments, that’s especially true. Also it can take more than two months to find a job even in a good field.
Taking out unaffordable loans such that you can't amass savings counts as not planning ahead. At the very least it's a terrible plan.
Yes, but we let people make that decision when they're much too young to be reasonable expected to make good long-term decisions.
OTOH, I don't think that's the central case of paycheck to paycheck households. No such households I know of personally are college-degreed households employed in white-collar work. Rather, it's high school and not-quite-high school households in blue-collar work. Your circles may vary.
*reasonably, dammit
You can just delete your post and repost a typo-corrected version immediately, as long as you catch it quickly.
"OTOH, I don't think that's the central case of paycheck to paycheck households."
Majuscule specifically cited " lots of educated people [...] usually throwing all their surplus income at loan payments", which is straightforwardly living above your means. Assuming the loans in question are mortgages, they overestimated how big/nice a home they could afford; supposing them instead to be pure consumption loans puts the behavior firmly in STAHP WAT R U DOIN territory.
Looking at the Wikipedia article, it looks like this model (or the earlier "natural rate of unemployment" concept) assumes unemployment coming from two causes: frictional unemployment (resulting from the relatively illiquid nature of the labor market, this is more-or-less unavoidable), and that real wages in some sectors are above the market-clearing wage because of the minimum wage, labor unions or similar factors. For the latter kind of unemployment, we should blame minimum wage laws, collective bargaining mandates etc. Inflation can increase employment because it can reduce real wages without people noticing and complaining about it as hard as they would complain about a nominal wage cut, and thus make wages closer to (or perhaps below) the market clearing wage. The model posits that, without increasing inflation, there is a natural rate of unemployment, depending on various market conditions such as labor laws. (In countries with flexible labor markets, such as the US or Germany, the natural rate of unemployment may be rather low. It's much more of a problem in countries like France, Italy or Spain.)
This concept doesn't inherently imply anything the central banks do or promise. (Based on the Wikipedia description.) However, central banks want to avoid excessive inflation, and under this model that has a side effect of having a certain level of unemployment.
I don't know how it works in other countries, but In New Zealand the reserve bank's mandate is to keep inflation between 1-3%, so they do increase interest rates and create unemployment (they don't hide anything about this, it's in their reports, I just wasn't aware of it until now). This all came to my attention when the employers and manufacturer's association ran a news article about how they thought unemployment was too low, and that we needed more unemployed people
Yes, central banks generally have such mandates or guidelines. As far as I can tell, increasing unemployment is a side-effect (the goal is limiting inflation). And it's an effect of the central bank's mandate, not of NAIRU, which is, as far as I can tell, a descriptive principle, not a normative mandate or promise. But again, this is just what I gather based on looking at the Wikipedia article.
I found this baffling because I thought that companies competing for workers by offering better pay and conditions was like, you know, the way it was supposed to work. Not a thing that independent central banks should try and prevent...
But you're assuming that the companies completing for workers are useful companies, meaning they produce something of genuine value to consumers. That is not always true. Sometimes companies are founded with stupid ideas, and they do not actually produce something that is worth (to consumers) the cost of its production. That company needs to go out of business, so the capital and labor it absorbs can be put to better use. One of the ways central banks signal to companies like this that they need to die is to raise interest rates, so that they cannot borrow money to stay alive (or get born in the first place). Basically by raising the price of capital you make people more careful about what kinds of crazy ideas they take to market, which means dumb ideas die faster.
It's all tied up with this idea that raising and lowering interest rates encourages and discourages business formation and risk-taking, the idea being that low rates encourage business formation and risk-taking, and high rates discourage it. In principle, the idea is that you raise rates when the economy is booming, so you discourage people from taking more risk than the booming economy already encourages them to take -- that is, you discourage foolhardiness when everyone's already wildly optimistic -- and you lower rates when the economy is in the pits, so you encourage people to take more risks when the crappy economy has made everyone far too pessimistic and careful.
I'm sure I'm not explaining this carefully enough, but that's my impression of how people think about it these days.
There are multiple factors here, but to keep it short and simple: if the central bank is not following the natural rate of interest in the economy, worse things can happen that will leave even more people unemployed. You're not trading off more vs less people unemployed right now, you're trading off who is unemployed in the medium-term.
Additionally, if capital is too cheap (interest rates are too low), projects that are otherwise stupid and wasteful can be undertaken, and employing people in things that are sub optimal or simply excessively risky which can have very damaging outcomes when they unwind. As with all things in economics, it comes down to opportunity costs.
Can you elaborate on the worse things? It seems to me that employing someone on a sub-optimal project is better than condemning them to be unemployed, particularly when employment and income are as tightly coupled as they are.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stagflation is the first answer that comes to mind, but people have also tied the GFC to excessively low interest rates incentivising excessive risk taking in financial markets.
If I understand that article correctly, in the case of wage-spiral inflation central banks increase interest rates, companies don't expand as fast, demand for labour goes down, people become unemployed and inflation reduces. In the case of stagflation, banks increase interest rates, companies don't expand as fast, demand for labour goes down but inflation keeps going because it wasn't competition for workers that was driving inflation. People still become unemployed. I think what I was arguing was that I didn't like banks increasing interest rates in either case. How would keeping interest rates low in the case of a supply shock exacerbate stagflation?
The stagflation argument is that interest rates in the 1960's were below the natural rate (or alternatively that growth in the monetary base was above the level supportive of the natural rate), which began inflation. After a certain point, that inflation came to be "expected" by all participants in the economy (inflation being a combination of real supply/demand factors and expectations: https://johnhcochrane.blogspot.com/2021/06/the-end-of-end-of-inflation.html), which made central bank action ineffective at correcting it and avoiding the damaging impacts of inflation on economic performance/employment.
The argument for inflation targeting actually began in NZ, where inflation in the 80s was persistently above 8%, increasing uncertainty in decision making. By taking a firm "anti inflation" stance and actually following through with interest rate rises even in the face of increased unemployment, the central bank signals to market participants that it is credible and this critical to managing the "expectations" part of the equation. As to how interest rates impact inflation, that is a multi dimensional and contested question that I'm not super keen on diving into my memories of university macroeconomics, sorry. Hope this is helping.
This might help if you don't mind listening to podcasts: https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2018/11/30/672366380/episode-879-the-secret-target
NAIRU is related to the idea that there is a tradeoff between inflation (nominal variable) and unemployment (real variable); the relationship was reified in the Phillips curve model. When central banks attempted to exploit the relationship it turned out to be contingent & unstable (cf. Lucas critique).
Deliberately making people unemployed slightly longer whenever they are unemployed, in order to prevent people from having to pay more for basic goods and services, seems like the kind of trade-off one needs to make in social policy.
Making unemployment a terrible experience doesn't seem justified though, even if unemployment were entirely self-chosen.
Is that the trade off though? Inflation doesn't mean people pay more for basic goods and services if wages are also inflating, which seems to be the thing the NAIRU model is concerned with. It seems like the trade off is people being unemployed longer vs... something to do with international exchange rates maybe? Or encouraging enterprises of low expected return on investment to go ahead?
And thank you for being the first one to respond to the second half of my question. I'd welcome more peoples' views on whether this seems justified.
Wages never rise as fast as prices in a true inflationary environment. That's why it's bad, that's why people were willing to endure savage pain in the early 80s to get rid of it. If wages rise as fast (or faster!) than prices, that's not "inflation" that's just ordinary economic growth.
This is important if true, can you verify it?
Well, in the sense of having lived through it in the 70s, sure, but if you mean by an econometric report, I'd have to go look for it. But you can be pretty generally confident that if wages normally rose faster than prices (or even at the same rate) during "inflation" nobody would care about it.
Right, I have to be careful with that. This isn't about wage-earners, but about institutions that get income from fixed interest rates and the like. I think the problem is *accelerating* inflation. With a high *fixed* inflation rate, you just set interest rates for loans high. But with *accelerating* inflation, you have to do something different for pricing bonds and savings and the like.
We have to look at the causes of the kind of unemployment that inflation affects. As far as I understand, what inflation does is essentially dupe workers into being willing to work for the market-clearing wage (instead of an above-market-clearing wage that minimum wage laws, collective bargaining etc. would sometimes enforce). Wage raises or cuts are more obvious than price increases, so companies can reduce real wages to the market-clearing level without causing too much upheaval.
The reasonable thing to do is to be willing to work for the market-clearing wage regardless of the level of inflation. Then you can have both low unemployment and low inflation. (The level of unemployment with a given inflation isn't set in stone: it depends on labor regulations and the workers' behavior.) This is what places with a low (or no) minimum wage, at-will employment and low unionization do, such as many US states.
If it's politically unfeasible to repeal or reduce the minimum wage, collective bargaining mandates, and limits on lay-offs* and wage cuts, then IMO a moderately high level of inflation (say, 4% instead of 2%) may be beneficial. In particular, it allows declining industries to reduce real wages without cutting nominal wages (which would be extremely unpopular and possibly illegal).
The NAIRU model posits that people take a constant level of inflation into account when judging their wages, and thus a high fixed inflation is insufficient to get them to accept market-clearing wages. To reduce unemployment, inflation needs to be not just high but accelerating. If so, that's definitely not worth it: accelerating inflation would sooner or later cause serious problems. However, I'm skeptical of this model: I'm pretty sure, for instance, that not getting a raise while the inflation is 4% would cause much less resistance than a 4% wage cut while there is no inflation.
* Why does repealing limitation on lay-offs *reduce* unemployment on the long run? Because if companies can't easily fire you, then they will only hire you if they are sure they'll need you for the foreseeable future. In particular, if the economy or a particular sector is in decline, with market-clearing wages decreasing, then if they hired you today for a market-clearing wage, in a few years they'd be forced to pay you an above-market-clearing wage if price inflation is lower than the rate of decline. That's how countries like France, Italy and Spain have ~10% unemployment even at the best of times. In contrast, if companies can fire you on a whim, they can afford to hire you on a whim, so you can quickly find at least a temporary job if you're laid off.
Whether it's bad or not depends on whether you fear unemployment or inflation more. I would guess the NAIRU is probably pretty low, like in the 3-5% range, and so the question is whether it is harsher to have that percentage of people unemployed (generally for short periods of time) or whether it is harsher to have prices rising so that *everybody* is experiencing a real wage cut every year.
Beyond that I think most economists think a rate of near zero unemployment is not a good thing, because it indicates too low a level of "creative destruction," meaning companies that *need* to go out of business, because their business models are stupid, their products don't work, they have terrible management, they are a waste of capital and effort, et cetera, aren't. They're sticking around as "zombies" and sucking up capital and labor that could and should go into more productive uses. That indicates a fossilized and inflexible economy that will have poor growth and be unusually vulnerable to changes in the international environment.
So to have a healthy economy, the argument goes, you need a certain amount of natural selection among companies, meaning some of them need to get culled every year as useless or stupid, and when that happens, people lose jobs.
Isn't an environment with near zero unemployment an environment of creative destruction though? Surely at that level, companies that can't afford to pay their staff an attractive compensation package will lose them to companies that can, and will fold for that reason. That's a ratchet of bad companies closing and freeing up resources for better ones too.
Well, yes, but people don't find new jobs instantaneously. If you have 100 million employed and 10 million of them lose their jobs each year because of creative destruction, and they all find new ones within an average of 6 months, then at any given time you have 5% of your working population unemployed.
The only way to cut unemployment to near zero is to have *such* a high demand for jobs that people get new jobs almost regardless of whether they are well-matched to them, a hiring frenzy. Those things can happen for rational reasons e.g. during the spool-up for a war, but in general it would probably signal an unhealthy level of risk-taking.
The other way to do it is to have it all planned, meaning a central planner decides which industrial efforts to shut down and when and where to send the workers, because then everything is decided in advance, and there's no need for a gap in employment. To some extent what the phenomenon of unemployment means is that we have decided to forgo central planning of employment and instead let each person figure out where he should be working on his own. But of course that takes time and effort, and as a matter of practice, almost nobody does any of it *until* he loses his job, which gives a lag time before the job placement effort bears fruit -- and that's our unemployment regime.
My impression was that, for IT people during the IT boom, unemployment was *very* brief.
Yup. It's great to be among the first in a rapidly growing new employment field. Guys with whom I went to college in the late 70s/early 80s who got interested in networked computing retired in their 40s and bought 4,000 square foot houses in Park City. Oh well.
I have a fantasy of an economy where it's like that for everyone, where frustrated would-be employers have to do extensive interviewing to get employees.
I don't know how it would work. UBI? Support systems which are so good that people are generally better off with their own businesses?
is vaccine hesitancy an isolated demand for rigor?
Depends on the individual, I suppose.
A sensible, consistent and principled vaccine-hesitancy stand might be "I refuse to take any medical product that hasn't been fully approved by the FDA". Any other year I'd be saying that this is a pretty sensible heuristic to decide what's worth taking.
On the other hand there are some people who are vaccine-hesitant who will nonetheless take a random pink pill that they found on the ground behind the toilets at a music festival. For those people, vaccine hesitancy would be an isolated demand for rigour.
The rate of vaccine hesitancy seems to be fairly consistent worldwide. Is there a cross-cultural way to measure a demand for rigor that filters out other prejudices. And rigor is built into Phase III trials. How about an isolated demand for the pablum of 100 percent certainty that no scientific study will ever provide?
Last I checked there are some significant differences in vaccine hesitancy in different countries. Canada, UK, and Spain are all low, US, France and Poland are all high. I think Japan is high.
Thanks for making me go back and check. The vaccine hesitancy data has changed since I last looked at it a few months ago. My bad.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-021-01454-y
Yup, it's only in the past few months that supply has been available enough for hesitancy to cash out as action rather than expressed preferences. The emerging plateaus in vaccination rates are where differences become meaningful rather than more culturally-relative rhetorical metrics.
Yes.
"Is vaccine hesitancy an isolated demand for rigor?"
Yes. But that doesn't tell us how to fix the problem effectively.
And fixing human reasoning in general is a great goal, but doing it in order to eliminate vaccine hesitancy is like using time travel to pick up a piece of paper left on the floor to prevent yourself from tripping one time 3 weeks ago. Sure, it's net positive, but c'mon!
I haven't taken the vaccine, but I would take it if I had to. I don't think my situation is an isolated demand for rigor, because "Don't take medicine unless you have to" is my perspective on all drugs. I don't like Advil, or flu medicine... I wouldn't take and pain killers when I had my wisdom teeth removed. I'll drink Alcohol (occasionally) or caffeine (constantly)
I would take the vaccine if I needed it to do something I wanted, or if I thought my mortality risk was higher than 1%.
Do you take anesthesia (ex. Novacaine) during dentistry?
Yeah I did, my concern there was once they got to drilling I wouldn't be able to take the drugs after the fact.
I filled the prescription they gave me for the painkillers so I would have them if I needed them, bur I ended up not using them.
By the same logic, if there was a "now or never" timer on the vaccine I would take it.
I think the 'now or never' point for a vaccine would be around a week before you catch the disease. Although since that is an ill-defined time (since it may be 'never'), there isn't a clear decision point in the same way there is for dentistry.
I think all preventative medicine would suffer from this same problem. So presumably no vaccine, no baby aspirin to reduce heart attack risk, maybe only un-flouridated water? I'm guessing that cancer screenings and other tests are OK on the other hand, since they aren't drugs.
Vaccine hesitancy of the form "we don't know the long term effects yet", given by someone who goes to crowded public indoor spaces without a mask, is definitely an isolated demand for rigor, since we also don't know the long term effects of the virus. But if a person is avoiding both the vaccine *and* the virus, then it's not clear that it is.
For me, that wouldn't convince me it is or isn't. The world has a lot more than just the two items 'vaccine' and 'virus'. For it not to be isolated, you would need to be applying the same level of rigor to all other aspects of risk assessment in your life, not just those that are covid related.
Sure. But this seems to be asking for a level of consistency that is impossible for real humans. When calling something an "isolated demand for rigor", it's helpful to show something closely related that the person is treating very differently, to help them think about which level of rigor is appropriate for the related context, rather than trying to make them rethink their approach to rigor for everything in their entire life all at once.
Right, nobody can be perfectly consistent... so your point is true if the goal is finger pointing and pointing or name calling. But I think it is ok to take a larger view if the goal is to say 'why in this instance am I being inconsistent with my demand for rigor'?
I’d say “no.” I think many vaccine hesitent people fall into one of three categories, and the following categories can’t really be described as an isolated demand for rigor:
1) something specific scares them about this vaccine (for example, for my Uncle he got a scary disease a couple years ago, and then it looked like the vaccine could cause a relapse so that freaked him out enough he avoided it for a while even after that was disproven).
2) They don’t do basically any vaccine, so COVID vaccines are a continuation of this policy
3) they already got COVID and are dubious that the added protection of the vax is worth the added risk when they already have some antibodies.
Interesting. What size estimate would you say each group is?
Anyone in Ann Arbor?
I find it shocking that the APS wouldn't publish this opinion piece. One has to wonder...
https://backreaction.blogspot.com/2021/07/can-physics-be-too-speculative.html
I'm not. It's not well-written. It skims over a number of cases without really diving into any one and exploring the reason it exists in the first place, what went wrong, and what might be a better way to proceed. It's a rather generic and not especially new complaint, so I would guess the APS's reason for not publishing it had more to do with "it's not a new thought and not very well written anyway" as compared to "Good God this will reveal the sordid underbelly of HEP that we must at all costs keep secret."
Of course. Silly me. We've made such wonderful advances in Physics over the past 50 years! String Theory has provided a testable proofs of the Theory of Everything. And the discovery of the multiverse has explained away all those pesky anomalies in quantum theory. And, yes, we should spend tens of billions of dollars on the next generation of super-colliders to possibly find some higher-energy particles. <#snarkasm>
I don't think there's anything wrong pointing out that the Physics community has wasted a lot of time on questions that have been scientific dead-ends — and suggesting that they focus their energies on topics that might yield less-grand shorter-term results.
Well, first of all, recall I didn't say Hossenfelder was wrong, I merely said she was unoriginal and tedious, which is kind of a trademark of hers from what I've seen. I realize she's trying to make a new career as a science commenter, but if I were her I'd look into finance or something, I don't think she has what it takes to communicate well and interestingly, and this essay is no exception.
Also, your second point about wasting time, while entirely tangential to my comment, is mistaken enough it begs for corrrection. The very nature of empirical science is that it "wastes" an enormous amount of time chasing down blind alleys. By definition good empiricists do not forswear the investigation of things that seem stupid for theoretical or "common sense" reasons. That's the difference between empiricism and scholasticism, and therefore between the *real* dead end of Dark Ages alchemy and the success of post-Enlightenment science. In the modern view, we regard the proof that such-and-such is a blind alley to be a valuable contribution to science, and we more or less proceed by randomly mapping blind alleys until we stumble across one that is not blind. (The conventional wisdom taught in grade schools and pop science media that science works by some kind of mystical intuition into what is probably correct, then backing that up with successful experiment as some kind of cherry-on-top proof, is so brain dead backwards it ought to make any practicing scientist who comes across it speechless with rage.)
Nor do I think anyone, or any class of people, should have any business telling the individual scientist where he should work: history gives us altogether too many examples of marvelous and unexpected discoveries attendant on some worker's weird idiosyncratic decisions of what interests him or her. In this case, the wisdom of the crowds is not wise at all.
On the other hand, if you want to argue that the public has a clear right to re-orient the funding of science research around things that are most likely a lot more testable than strings, that's just fine, and in fact I would entirely agree with you. However, other people have made this argument, and made it much better than Hossenfelder, and that was my point. I'm disappointed in Hossenfelder resorting to the tediously common appeal to paranoia argument as an explanation for why her essay was rejected, rather than the more self-aware and cooly rational hypothesis that her writing isn't good enough. That way lies the potential for improvement and a better chance next time.
Can you provide some links to other people who have made similar arguments ot Hossenfelder? In the meantime, let me digest what you said, and I'll respond to your points anon.
My favorite is Lee Smolin's book "The Trouble With Physics," which I admire for the detail into which he goes, the examples he provides, the sympathy he generally gives for how we got here in the first place -- he assumes people had good intentions and pretty sound instincts, and what happened is a combination of natural human behavior and some chunk of bad luck -- what the genuine challenges are, and a few thoughts about how to do better. I'm not saying I necessarily agree with everything he said, or says, or even most of it, but I think he makes similar points much more usefully and provides solid food for thought.
I had about forgotten about Lee Smolin's book. Good one.
I've been running an online discussion group on Parfit's Reasons and Persons. We're wrapping up Part One next week (fourth meeting). This isn't so far into the book that it would be difficult for anyone to ramp up and join us.
Meetup link: https://www.meetup.com/Seattle-Analytic-Philosophy-CLUB/events/279625335/
All are welcome as long as you do the reading and stay on topic.
Worth a read - this paper by a team working with Gelman at Columbia is super-interesting and explains something you have talked about a bit in terms of multiple causes and limited possible room for explanation, but it explains this far more clearly than anything I have seen before.
http://stat.columbia.edu/~gelman/research/unpublished/piranhas.pdf
Abstract: In some scientific fields, it is common to have certain variables of interest that are of particular importance and for which there are many studies indicating a relationship with a different explanatory variable. In such cases, particularly those where no relationships are known among explanatory variables, it is worth asking under what conditions it is possible for all such claimed effects to exist simultaneously. This paper addresses this question by reviewing some theorems from multivariate analysis that show, unless the explanatory variables also have sizable effects on each other, it is impossible to have many such large effects. We also discuss implications for the replication crisis in social science.
Is there a replication crisis in social science or are the standards of replication crises (where there is one is in hot debate in neuro and cell bio rn) in harder fields being universally applied everywhere? The findings of social studies are never going to be in line with dogmatic deductive scientific methods.
I've been holding meet ups in Budapest, and we'll definitely be ready to do one in September
Also, while it's not impossible, I'd be pretty surprised if the Hungarian government instituted new lock downs based on Delta, hospitalizations would need to get far worse than they have in Britain.
I'm not very active here, but I would be interested in going to a meetup in Malta in ~September, and I wouldn't consider holding one indoors irresponsible, though I think meeting outdoors would be more pleasant. Not sure if there are any other readers from Malta tho?
Sorry, not from Malta - I am from Germany, which is why I feel the urge to point out that your user name is lacking an 's'. It should be "Wasserschweinchen". (Cute avatar, by the way.)
Danke =)
Why is a Wasserschwein called that? It doesn't look like a pig to me.
Linnaeus seems to have thought that they were pigs and therefore named them hydrochaeris, according to https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capybara#Taxonomie_und_Systematik
The related and similarly named Meerschweinchen – guinea pigs – curiously also have a pig in their Latin name.
I'm organizing the ACX / LessWrong meetings in Portland, Oregon for the past couple months and we are comfortable meeting in person with an online option.
It would appear we still don't have much of our pre-pandemic attendence and I would very much appreciate any publicity or visits you could offer. We meet bi-weekly at the beeminders house, and have attendence around 10 people. I'd be happy to communicate more about it over email at scelarek@gmail.com.
Thanks Scott!
In England no one has any idea what stuff will be like by September I personally don't think I would comfortable go to a meet up until 2022
I want to recommend "The Hidden Spring" by Mark Solms. It talks at length about predictive coding, etc, and also purportedly gives an account for how and why consciousness arose.
I experience debilitating shame for situations that my subconscious deems "mistakes". It can scale from the event haunting me for a couple of hours, to days, to weeks, and the worst cases I'll remember as painful flashbacks forever. If I make a mistake that gets deemed as particularly bad, my brain will use most of its processing power to go over the situation again and again, making it impossible to focus on anything. I've walked through red light into a street in this state only realizing it after a car horn. This is similar to when you hear about a problem someone is having and your brain immediately goes into problem solving mode, except there is no solution to past mistakes so you get stuck in a loop. I've kind of learned to live with this, but it seems to be a root cause for many traits and behaviors.
The problem I'm having though is that I have difficult time defining what this is, finding any information on it or finding people who have this issue. There's avoidant personality, but that places emphasis on relationships and otherwise doesn't feel like a fit. There is generally just discussion on shame, but it often places emphasis on feelings of inadequacy. My emphasis is more on the aftermath, the debilitating effect of it, the flashbacks that feel like someone stabbing me out of the blue. It doesn't matter if I rationally know I made no mistake, I still can't shake the reaction my body has to it.
Does this sound familiar to anyone? Any resources you can point out for me to further research this on my own?
I think many people do experience this, I myself have episodes going back to my childhood popping up into the conscious from memory again for no reason that I can discern (there isn't any particular trigger).
It seems like the subconscious just likes to spring "Hey, remember that devastatingly humiliating time when you made a total fool of yourself/screwed up really badly? Let's relive that all over again in excruciating detail while I tell you what a worthless sack of shit you are!" at times. I have no idea what it's called or what can be done to sort it out - I imagine the recommendation for therapy would be CBT but that's as far as I can go.
Embarrassing experiences from your past coming up is just a normal part of the human experience for everyone, or at least everyone I both know and have met on the internet.
Tentative: It might be filed under intrusive thoughts.
John, this is very familiar. I also have flashbacks to painfully embarrassing moments in my past, often to the point where I say aloud "No, don't" or something similar. Thinking about it now, I'd say the most powerful reactions are to incidents from adolescence or early adulthood.
I was in CBT for a while and the best advice I got was to forgive myself for the incident and move on. That seems to help a bit, but it's certainly not a cure.
Familiar to me too, including the occasional involuntary vocalizations.
I've more or less convinced my brain that there is a "statute of limitations" of 5 years on these things, so that I don't need to feel bad about incidents older than that, because I've changed enough as a person since then. That doesn't fix the more recent ones, but maybe I can gradually shorten the timespan.
This sounds related to the extreme scrupulosity often averred by readers of this and the previous blog. You can't tolerate ever making a mistake ever and are haunted by it, whereas a normal person just doesn't *care* that much about it compared to, say, the nicest pair of tits currently visible on this particular street. That thing where prominent utilitarians get paroxysms from merely thinking about the concept of suffering also seems related; both are instances of some sort of highly-unrealistic neurotic perfectionism, badly adapted to (seemingly even disgusted by, at times) life in the actual cosmos.
What sort of mistakes? Also I’m not sure of the use of subconscious here - at least in, like, “lizard brain” cases you can claim a distinction between rational and emotional brain or whatever, not that it’s meaningful, but this is a “rationality error” so I don’t think that’s really any more sub of conscious than anything.
It’s probably (classified as) a form of OCD, guilt/shame/intrusive thought/scrupulously is my guess. Not a fan of that classification and associated approaches to treatment myself though!
Thoughts tend to think themselves. And for a lot of people the negative thoughts have a lot more emotional pull than the positive.
A lot of personal experience this including me. It seems like it’s having a debilitating effect in your case though.
One possible remedy that you can do on your own is a daily breathing meditation where you let thoughts arise and acknowledge the emotional discomfort of the painful ones. They tend to slip away easier than if you try to repress them. A sort of acknowledge and let go technique.
With a regular practice you will begin to rewire your Default Mode Network, the habituated thought processes that your mind drifts into when not actively engaged.
There are a lot of apps that can get you started with a meditation practice. I used the Calm App and after I while my DMN did begin to change.
I’ve gotten to a point where I only use the app’s timer now. It plays a gentle gong every 15 minutes.
If this doesn’t suit your style, CBT may be the way to go. I’m pretty sure with some self work you should be able to improve the way your mind treats you.
Good luck and have hope!
That is horrifying IMO. I don’t think OCD stuff is generally about the emotion of it exactly either
What do you mean your DMN changed? Did you get some sort of scan?
The Default Mode Network has a technical definition that I’ll let the link below describe.
The things that are processed in it are day dreaming, random ruminations when you aren’t using your mind to do some task or solve some problem.
People tend to habitually fall into the same sorts of ruminations by default. If they cause no distress, no problem. If they tend negative, thinking of past failures or worrying about possible future problems, a person can probably improve this collection of seemingly random thoughts.
The DMN is gone over in some detail in the Michael Pollan book “How to Change Your Mind” or word to that effect.
Nothing to be horrified about. If you change the DMN for the better you just spend less time dwelling on past mistakes or possible future problems and pay attention to and enjoy what’s right in front of you now.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Default_mode_network
By my DMN changed I meant i. I experience a lot more joy than before. If that’s horrific, I’ll take it. :)
I don’t think your dmn changed in the sense of the actual default mode network’s machine observable properties lol
In which case I revert to standard horror at new age therapy meditation
Well, I guess If you take it in a literal sense of physical change, you are right.
Practicing thinking to become better at thinking sounds horrifying?
I certainly have this to a degree, though it’s less problamatic.
I think the best advice for where to find stuff about it, if this is as big a problem as it sounds like, is to seek professional help from a psychiatrist or psychologist rather than internet strangers. They’d be able to talk with you to get more precise information and suggest more precise treatments/diagnoses.
But, if you, like me, have an irrational aversion towards going to psychs, the way I handle it is to learn a method that overrides the thoughts. My go to used to be League of Legends (I’m not joking), since I found the mixture of physical activity/high concentration/rage at my teammates usually distracted me long enough I could pull out of a really deep rut. For smaller ruts, I’d just pick a topic to think about it and do my best to drag myself back to that topic every time.
Obviously League or just “think about other stuff really hard” might not work as well for you, but I’d say that you should note down the things that you do that seem to be at the end of these ruts, and then see if you can adapt them into a useful breakout behavior.
But I’m not a professional, so disclaimer blah blah blah.
I'm not a doctor, but that sounds a lot like generalized anxiety disorder, so you may want to follow up with a mental health professional. Feeling bad about mistakes is normal, but if those feelings are always blowing up and never go away, that's not normal.
Yep - most annoying it is too - to err is human
Sounds familiar to me, except mine's about humiliation.
I model this as something like PTSD - my brain got a threat model it deems dangerous, and tries to make sure I find corresponding situations painful enough to avoid them like death. (or someting like that)
Solution that (slowly) works for me is bit by bit building a model / comprehension of reality that "allows" this type of situation, an understanding that explicitly includes how mundane it really is.
Should add that it might be useful to first explore *why* that type of situation "is" dangerous.
You may consciously know it isn't, but honestly, sometimes it feels like my conscious beliefs are just tribal rhetoric I internalized. Like my true beliefs are closer to how I *feel* about things.
So, listen to the feelings, try to let them explain what exactly the danger is. IME the emotional reasoning is often quite sound and deserves careful debate with everything else you know.
You got a lot of advice here. The important take away is you can make your life better. It might not be easy but few worthwhile things are.
What are some possible future trajectories for lock-down-like Covid-19 restrictions? (I'm primarily interested in the US, but the arguments might be generic.) Here are a few I can think of:
1. Permanent mini-lockdown, possibly oscillates up and down. Businesses are legally required to discourage work from the office as much as possible, local public transport requires masks, air travel requires health checks and/or proofs of vaccinations, international travel includes quarantines, etc. This seems difficult to pull off both politically and also in terms of long-term compliance (including "difficult politically because of poor long-term compliance").
2. A requisite portion of the population (70%?) gets vaccinated, and Covid-19 is declared to be over. Seems somewhat implausible (and/or slow) in the US as a whole since vaccinations seem to have stalled at a bit more than 50%, although perhaps if the vaccine is approved in children, we'll cross that threshold. Also, with the Delta variant more contagious (and perhaps more likely to turn vaccinated people into carriers / spreaders) than previously expected, the previously-advertised 70% might get bumped up higher?
3. It is empirically observed that cases and/or deaths have dropped enough to stop imposing restrictions. (i.e. mini-lockdown that actually gradually ends.) Perhaps this is because we achieve herd immunity by natural immunity; with ~10% of the US as cases, and ~50% vaccinated, depending on how many cases were missed due to lack of symptoms, we might actually be close. Because of inertia, I would expect Covid-19 deaths being treated as more important than other deaths for a while, causing this to take longer than e.g. if we had equivalent levels of deaths but had crossed an observable vaccination threshold.
4. We declare Covid to be over now, and just deal with the extra cases. This would be somewhere between declaring that lockdowns were a bad idea to begin with, and declaring that we've achieved #3 (e.g. "yes cases from delta are rising, but they're not rising all that much").
My interest here is partly in planning my own life (e.g. when might international travel be a thing again?) and partly in trying to understand some of the positive externalities vaccinations have on other people (e.g. if we're following scenario #2, then you vaccinating makes my lockdown end faster; this mechanism is absent from scenarios #1, #3, #4).
As I said elsewhere, COVID will never be over; instead, it will become endemic, just like the flu. Realistically, I expect to see "rolling lockdowns" in the foreseeable future. For example, hospitalizations are surging in LA county, so LA county re-instituted mask mandates. I fully expect them to re-issue lockdown orders sometime in the near future. Meanwhile, other counties are going to coast along, until the next Delta/Lambda/Xi/whatever variant causes them to tip over. This process will continue for the foreseeable future (barring Singularity-grade medical advances).
As you said, even 70% vaccination is unlikely, so herd immunity is off the table -- and it won't happen naturally, because the virus mutates too fast for that.
International travel is sort of possible now, but it will never again be as fast or as convenient as it was before COVID. You will have to budget 1..4 weeks of quarantine into every trip, depending on where you're going; and you should be prepared to be locked down upon arrival.
I should've clarified that I don't expect COVID the virus to go away, but one possible future would be that it's legally treated like the flu (i.e. you're encouraged to vaccinate, but there's very limited legal requirements around that, and instead it's largely left to your own decision-making).
I wanted to follow up on your "even 70% vaccination is unlikely, so herd immunity is off the table -- and it won't happen naturally, because the virus mutates too fast for that". I don't think I disagree with you about the conclusions, but you seem to be implying that 70% vaccination (or 80% vaccination, or whatever the updated number is) would be enough for herd immunity, while having that fraction of the population get the disease would not be sufficient. I'm confused by the implied claim that the virus can out-mutate natural immunity but not artificially-induced immunity.
First, is this a claim you meant to make at all, or am I misreading?
Second, if this is actually something you're claiming, can you elaborate on why? Is artificial immunity that much stronger than natural immunity when it comes to variants? Or is it that much easier to get everyone vaccinated in a short period of time (thus eradicating the disease), whereas natural immunity will be more drawn out and there never will be 70% of people who are solidly immune to whatever is making the rounds currently?
Well, the live virus does mutate, and I would assume it could eventually evade vaccine defenses that way. Whereas if almost everybody were to get vaccinated, it probably wouldn't find as many vulnerable hosts as it needs to evolve a successful evasion technique. Plus, artificial immunity should last longer due to adjuvants, and coronaviruses are generally known for the short time immunity lasts (I haven't seen estimates for Covid specifically).
> Realistically, I expect to see "rolling lockdowns" in the foreseeable future.
Everywhere, or in some jurisdictions? The UK went along with lifting nearly all restrictions, except those on international travel, despite near-record cases.
What are US states doing? Have some of them lifted all restrictions? How many?
> International travel is sort of possible now, but it will never again be as fast or as convenient as it was before COVID. You will have to budget 1..4 weeks of quarantine into every trip, depending on where you're going; and you should be prepared to be locked down upon arrival.
Many countries are lifting quarantine requirements for vaccinated travellers (and/or for recently tested ones) at least from some countries, though it depends very much on where you're going from where.
I think the most likely thing is that a whole bunch of vaccine mandates come down. There is a recent surge of these among government and healthcare workers, and if those survive the inevitable legal challenge, I think it not unlikely that will pave the way for big business, and then medium to small business, to likewise impose them as a condition of employment. Nobody likes the huge expense of COVID adaptations, and they like even less the possibility of being sued because the receptionist caught COVID allegedly because the employee bathroom sink wasn't sufficiently sterilized.
So if business can wash its hands of the whole thing by saying "get a vaccine or get another job" they will, and then it's game over for almost all of the vaccine hesitant -- when it's a conflict between principles and $$ in the paycheck, the latter always wins.
The most interesting part of this are the state-by-state differences. I can easily see some legislatures passing laws that say businesses can't be sued for requiring COVID vaccination as a condition of employment, and then it's off to the races, while other legislatures might easily pass laws prohibiting requiring vaccines as a condition for employment, and then I doubt vaccination levels will vary much, unless people start dying in large numbers again.
It's not immediately obvious to me what this says about the future of lockdown-and-mask-and-quarantine-style restrictions: are we expecting those to become declared unnecessary (because, with paychecks in the picture, 70% of people do get vaccinated), or to become observed unnecessary (because enough people will have gotten immunity one way or the other that the hospitalizations and deaths settle down), or to continue basically indefinitely?
I'd be super interested in holding a meetup in Mexico City. As for whether it is irresponsible, although vaccination has been slower than what one would wish for, most people I hang out with here are already vaccinated (most got vaccinated in the US over the past few months). I imagine that people who would'd be interested in an ACX meet up would be drawn from a similar population and hence have higher than average vaccination rates, so I wouldn't be very worried about risk of contagion. Of course, one can always make, vaccination mandatory for the meeting.
I would attend an in-person meetup. I'm already going to indoor gatherings 1-2x per week currently.
I'm in Seattle and would attend
I would go to either indoor or outdoor meetup in September. I would be more worried about the state of restrictions here in Poland by then: there are virtually no cases at the moment, so September might still see a new peak in cases and some lockdowns (vaccination-wise, Poland is doing slightly worse than EU overall).
I think a lot of rationalists and rationalist-adjacent types massively overestimate the possible practical value of space colonisation as a way of avoiding extinction.
The future is hard to predict, sure. It could be very good, or very bad. I think a future where humans progress to the point where humans are, someday, capable of establishing functioning colonies on Mars, the Moon, and conceivably other objects in the solar system, while optimistic, is perfectly credible. And a future in which human activity or natural disaster renders the earth uninhabitable beyond anything we can do to prevent it, and humans go extinct is distressingly plausible.
But a future in which both those things happen simultaneously strikes me as much, much less likely. Establishing undersea civilisations, or turning the Sahara or the Antarctic into hospitable paradises, or reversing all the pollution humans have ever caused and much worse besides, or would be tasks with a lot in common with rendering other planets hospitable, but much easier.
If we ever become capable of colonising other planets, we almost certainly won't need to.
I'm a both/and thinker about this. I think it's entirely reasonable to have orbital habitats that support trillions of humans (even normal meat humans like us) in this solar system, and make Earth (or even other planets ) into a paradise.
There are lots of ways the world could end (meaning intelligent life in human form.) Impacts, gamma ray bursts, aliens, who knows. Lots of ways we can't even anticipate right now, I'm sure. But I'm with Elon and others: let's get up there and out of the cradle and extend our chances.
Yeah, I’m pretty sure those UAPs the navy pilots keep running into are just billionaires from another planet.
That looks snarkier in print than I meant it. Just a silly joke.
Why assume only humans are capable of making the Earth uninhabitable? We live next to a star, and stars are exceedingly high-energy objects. Nor do we understand them well enough to predict what they'll do over even a mere million years or so. All the Sun has to do is increase or decrease its luminosity by, say, 10% for the next 100,000 years, and we're all screwed. Or a comet could come trundling in from the outer darkness and hit the planet, or a series of them like Shoemaker-Levy hitting Jupiter.
That also means there are ways in which the Earth can be threatened that no amount of geoengineering tech can fix, e.g. the habitable zone around the Sun moves out to the orbit of Jupiter or something. In which case, we'd better know how to engineer Europa or something.
> All the Sun has to do is increase or decrease its luminosity by, say, 10% for the next 100,000 years, and we're all screwed. Or a comet could come trundling in from the outer darkness and hit the planet
The former hasn't happened in the last several hundred million years, and the latter has only happened a few times at most. (I mean, a comet/asteroid that would pose an extinction risk to humans.) This can help estimate the risk of it happening in the next x years.
In particular, I definitely the risk of extinction from non-human causes in the next few hundred years is small enough that it doesn't justify expending significant resources on space colonization today, when technological development will in all likelihood make it much cheaper a few hundred years from now than it is today.
It's seemed to me that getting humans on Mars or the Moon doesn't add much redundancy that prevents against disasters. It's hard to think of a disaster that kills everyone on Earth without killing everyone in the solar system. Getting humans out of the solar system might though.
Sure it is. The K-T impact repeated would have a good chance of wiping out civilization, and wouldn't effect any other planet. An even larger impact, such as the one thought to have created the Moon, would almost certainly wipe out all life on the planet. A close encounter with another star could perturb only the Earth's orbit fatally. And leaving those aside, within the next billion years the Sun will brighten enough to make the Earth uninhabitably hot, while making the outer planets more habitable.
I think the impact that created the Moon would also likely wipe out life on Moon and Mars, not just on Earth. Less obvious about the close encounter with another star. I think you're right that the K-T impact would be a size that would likely be existential for life on Earth but not for life on Mars, and maybe not for the Moon either.
Now that you mention it, I do seem to remember thinking that in Bostrom's list of existential threats, all would likely hit Moon and Mars if they were sufficient to extinguish human life on Earth, except for asteroid. (Pandemic, nuclear war, bad societal equilibrium, gamma ray burst.)
Not sure I understand your original comment, then. Are you saying Mars runs the same risk of impacts as the Earth, or are you saying that the *same* impact would simultaneously wipe out life on Earth or Mars? I *thought* you were saying "a" disaster that wipes out everyone on Earth would probably wipe out everyone on any planet in the Solar System -- which would mean the same impact (given you used the article "a") would have to wipe out life on both planets -- which is obviously silly.
So now I'm confused. Are you just saying that Mars runs the same risk as Earth at catastrophic impacts? I would agree with that, but recall that if humanity is self-sufficient on both planets (a big ask), then the probability that humanity is wiped out is the joint probability of near-simultaneous* impacts on both planets, which is exceedingly unlikely, indeed has probably never happened aside from the initial condensation of the planets.
---------------
* Because if the impacts are widely separated in time (by human standards, e.g. 10,000 years, which is an eyeblink by astronomical standards), whichever planet was *not* hit can repopulate the one that was.
My thought is that if a pandemic, or a nuclear war, or a bad societal equilibrium (lock-in), or a gamma ray burst, destroyed all human life on Earth, the same event would probably destroy all human life on the Moon or Mars.
In my original comment I had thought the same was true for asteroid impacts, but I now accept that a K-T sized impact would likely wipe out life on one planet but not another, though a Theia/Moon sized impact probably would wipe out life on all three if it did so for one.
It seems to me that it would be a long haul to get off-earth habitats which aren't dependent on earth, but not impossible.
Well, a gamma-ray burst or other cosmic event, yes, that could indeed sterilize the entire Solar System. But I'm still unclear on why you think even a body the size of the Moon hitting the Earth would have any simultaneous effect on Mars. The two planets are really, really far apart, about 60 million km at closest approach, so it's kind of like if a bullet hits an apple why would that do anything to another apple 300 meters away?
In the very long run you gotta remember there’s no reversing entropy.
>If we ever become capable of colonizing other planets, we almost certainly won't need to.
"Need", in common usage, means much more than "will become literally extinct without". I agree that space is overrated as a location for Apocalypse Bunkers, and that this is a poor argument for developing and settling places extraterrestrial. But we've discussed that already back on SSC: https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/12/17/acc-should-we-colonize-space-to-mitigate-x-risk/
Meanwhile, an awful lot of us seem to need, in the usual colloquial sense, things that are increasingly difficult to provide from purely terrestrial sources because e.g. NIMBY is a thing and the whole world is someone's back yard. And whatever we *can* get or have from just Earth alone, we're going to want more of.
Oh, hey, I wrote that Ad-Collab! I really enjoyed the experience too. I hope Scott runs more Ad Collabs in the future.
I initially supported terrestrial apocalypse communities, due to their accessibility in an emergency. But by the end of the piece, I came to the conclusion that the political will to maintain them would have to be consistent over generations. by contrast, a moon bunker is something that you kinda *have* to maintain and can't just quietly defund.
I don't much like the idea of barely self sufficient colonies on the Moon and Mars, because the Moon and Mars are frankly pretty sucky real estate compared to the Earth. Who's going to want to live there, once the novelty is gone?
My idea of space colonisation is to create places that are better than Earth. The movie Elysium (stripping away the dumb class warfare plot) shows what a probable minimum viable better-than-Earth space habitat might look like. Beyond that, if you can make your habitats several thousand km wide (I forget how wide exactly?) then you can spin them to create 1g while replicating a human-friendly day-night cycle.
Anyway, a level of technology which allows us to strip the moon to create such habitats is also probably the level of technology which allows some depressed madman in a lab to raze the entire Earth's biosphere, so perhaps for that reason it's worth being concerned about the long-term survival of Earth.
Not being in a gravity well could be useful if you're a transportation hub.
> Who's going to want to live there, once the novelty is gone?
Most people won't. But most people never become colonists. You only need a fraction of a fraction of a fraction.
Avoiding extinction over the next billion years is the argument
Has it occurred to anyone that humanity is already waging wars about imaginary lines, and interplanetary differences are gonna add a *lot* of fuel to anti-outgroup sentiments?
If we spread to multiple planets, the planets will have anti-outgroup sentiment directed at one another. But each planet will have less anti-outgroup sentiment internally. Nothing unites like an enemy.
Could anyone give me a more nuanced explanation as to what “ban teaching critical race theory in schools” looks like as a policy? I’ve seen that sort of terminology tossed around in the media for some states’ laws, but it feels like there’s a lot of vagueness there. To me there’s a big difference between “critical race theory can never be mentioned/explained/analyzed in schools” and “students can’t be forced to take a class that teaches them that critical race theory is true.”
I’d just like to note that I will try to avoid getting myself into arguments over whether the policies are good; I’m more interested in whether this is something like the Georgia voting laws that got oversimplified by the media, or if they’re as cut and dry as it is made out to be.
Thanks in advance
Thank you, I found these helpful, especially for reminding me that any legislation can be made worse by adding incompetence.
Most of the laws don't mention the phrase "critical race theory". For the Texas bill (https://legiscan.com/TX/text/HB3979/id/2339637) most of the text seems fine, but there are a few shocking things in there.
"no teacher shall be compelled by a policy of any
state agency, school district, campus, open-enrollment charter
school, or school administration to discuss current events or
widely debated and currently controversial issues of public policy
or social affairs;"
"No teacher, administrator, or other employee in
any state agency, school district, campus, open-enrollment charter
school, or school administration shall shall require, or make part
of a course the following concepts: ... (4)
members of one race or sex cannot and should not attempt to treat
others without respect to race or sex;"
"No private funding shall be accepted by state
agencies, school district, campuses, open-enrollment charter
schools, or school administrations for the purposes of curriculum
development, purchase or choice of curricular materials, teacher
training, or professional development pertaining to courses on
Texas, United States, and world history, government, civics, social
studies, or similar subject areas."
I really really enjoy how it went the full circle and now the right officially insist that all races are equal and should be treated as such, and the left insist that they are not and some races deserve special treatment and deference from others.
Wait, are you saying that teachers should lie to students and say that pretending not to see race or gender is the same as actually ignoring it? Because it's pretty clear that most people, if not all people, actually find it impossible to actually be race-blind or gender-blind.
I can see that it's aspirational, but it seems bad to require teachers to ignore reality.
"It can be difficult to X" and "you cannot X" are often used colloquially as synonyms of each other, as when people say "you cannot raise taxes without harming economic development" or "you cannot jump across this six foot gap".
And when something is difficult or impossible to do successfully, it is often the case that trying to do it will result in worse failings than trying something else. There's a meaningful discussion about whether trying to ignore people's race and gender is an effective way to result in more equal treatment of people, but this bill is trying to make it illegal to have that discussion in school, and to mandate that teachers never discuss evidence for the side that says that trying to treat people in a race-blind way often ends up with more unequal racial treatment than race-conscious policies.
The only objection I have to any of it is that I'd prefer a general principle that publicly funded schools shouldn't teach normative judgments, rather than only banning some specific judgments.
The voters's values should guide government policy, not the other way around. When the government attempts to shape the values of (future) voters, it either just leads to conformism (if it teaches the values of the majority), or it's anti-democratic (if it teaches values different from those of the majority); I consider it inappropriate either way. If the government only bans making certain specific political judgments, it may end up just changing the shape of the propaganda pushed at public schools, instead of eliminating it.
Thanks, reading the law’s raw text (I followed the link) helped.
I don't know that you would regard it as nuanced in any sense, but to me the policy is very simple: you can't teach anti-scientific drivel in school. It doesn't matter whether it's astrology, intelligent design, gender studies, or critical race theory, it shouldn't be permitted.
Does it count as "anti-scientific drivel" to characterize "critical race theory" or "gender studies" as such? It's true that there is anti-scientific drivel within some of the work that goes by those terms. But to characterize an entire field as such when there is quite a bit of careful scientific work within the field is anti-scientific too.
No, it isn't. There's a bunch of mock-scientific academic work in these fields, sure; but you'll find that there's also a bunch of mock-scientific academic work on ID. Neither exhibits the sligthest probity or verity.
Dunno if that's a great argument, given that there was a great deal of valuable and accurate astrometry amid astrology, and a great deal of valuable and useful characterization of chemical reactions amid alchemy, and for that matter John C. Calhoun made some wise and sensible statements about the nature of a federal government amid his defense of slavery.
That is, a field of work need not be *entirely devoid* of intellectual merit to be condemned. We can come to that conclusion based on its central premises, and personally I would consider any field which has as a central premise that awareness of racial differences is, or ought to be, central to the function of human society to be pretty suspect. The distinction between that and outright racism is too narrow, to me. Such a field would have to clear a very high bar of evidentiary proof that it has general merit for me to consider it acceptable to enshrine as a legitimate field of study.
"You can't teach anti-scientific drivel" sounds like a simple policy, until you discover that different people have very different ideas of what constitutes anti-scientific drivel.
Sure; it's also notably the case that it's easier to get laws against anti-scientific drivel perceived as conservative on the books than prog drivel. Nevertheless, that doesn't mean critical race theory is any less drivel than intelligent design.
Anyone have a recommendation for a good course to learn solidity ?
What do you mean by solidity?
It’s the programming language for writing smart contracts on ethereum.
Thanks. I was wondering whether it was an emotional trait.
or a mechanical one
I have a room that isn't getting as cool as the rest of the house, causing some suffering for people inside of it, so I'm looking into window AC units.
The room also doesn't heat well in the summer, so I thought, "oh, I'll get one with a heat pump, too."
Well, window AC units are less than $200, and AC-units-with-heat-pumps seem to go for at least $600.
What gives? I thought a heat pump was just an AC unit running in reverse. This is for a relatively southern climate, so I don't need to push against an insane heat gradient. From the looks of it I'll just be better running a space heater 24/7.
I'm no expert, but I think usually an AC works by just having the compressor on the exterior, so it radiates the heat into the outdoors. In order to make that into a heat pump, you have to pump that heated air into the building. I don't know if that means you have to physically structure the compressor in a different way, or have two of them, or something else.
Like you, I would have thought it should be basically the same, but thinking of it in terms of a window unit rather than a central one made it clear to me that *something* more has to be different.
I was thinking "screw you guys, i f you're gonna charge me 3x, I'll buy 2 @ 1x each, and install one in each direction," but trying to air condition the outside might be bad for the coils.
That’s pretty funny
It’s a little more complicated. The window heat pumps are new to me so I can’t tell you why they are more expensive. Being new could be a large part of it.
If you’d like to know how they work it’s probably best to begin at the beginning.
How do I do that Mr Science?
Well Eddy there is a well known principle called the Carnot Cycle.
Carnot Cycle? What the hell is that?
Well Eddy…
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carnot_cycle
You need ACX units 😅
You need several additional valves, some of which need to work with high-pressure refrigerant, as well as more complicated electronic control widgetry, to reverse the flow of refrigerant and switch from heating to cooling. That's a reason on the supply side. On the demand side, I would guess the demand for window heat pump isn't nearly as big as the demand for window A/C units, so, economies of scale, competition, et cetera.
How did "simp" replace "beta orbiter?"
Somehow I feel like this calls for a Yo Mama joke. Don’t know any though.
Yo Mama so out of date, she still calls her simps beta orbiters.
This question interested me, so I googled it. Oddly enough, perhaps, Dictionary.com has a detailed chronology of big simpin': https://www.dictionary.com/e/slang/simp/
Wiktionary has that definition, and an older one. Unfortunately they put the Sir Mix-a-Lot quote under the wrong one. https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/simp
"Beta orbiter" was used by nerds and has five syllables, "simp" was used by cool people and has one syllable.
Twitch made simping a lot more apparent, culminating in the hot tub meta.
I blame Phineas and Ferb
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=prVTMrb6JHo
Whenever I hear someone complain about the "digital dark age", I wonder if it really is a problem in light of the likelihood that the NSA has been saving all the contents of the internet for years now. Someday, it will be released back to the public.
I've been happy doing indoor social events with presumably vaccinated people the past few weeks. I'm not sure if I still would be happy with this in September. It will depend a lot on whether the recent spikes in the US reverse themselves.
I basically think of capitalism as expressing human desires weighted by purchasing power. If you imagine some kind of "work point" system based on how long you work, how arduous your work is, and how rare the skills are for your work in comparison to the desire for it, it seems to me that when you work for someone else you earn "work points" in the form of money that you can spend to get someone else to do work that *you* want them to do. (Except in a complicated acasual way where people predict your desires instead of responding to them, but in effect it's similar.) Then there's saving, where you sacrifice your work points in the present (freeing people up to do work other people want them to do), somehow in exchange for more work points in the future, that I don't fully understand. Is that a good way of thinking about it?
Oh, also, I don't understand the effect of countries printing currency. It seems like it should be a huge asset, so I don't understand the situation with the euro (it can't be the case that each european country has their own central bank that can print their own euros at their discretion, right?)
Precisely - there's one European Central Bank; which has created interesting intra-Union dynamics; for example one of the reasons the original Grexit was so opposed in the core of the EU was because having the country in the currency was effectively inflationary to the entire Euro - boosting export-driven economies like Germany that would, ceteris paribus, have stronger currencies.
That's the gist, but it falls apart once you have a massive amount of capital (land, real estate) acquired originally by violence, that is needed by everyone. See all the Georgism discussion on ACX.
Re saving, you're essentially lending your work points to someone else who would like to have more, because they can turn them into even more (leverage) and they're sharing their profits by paying interest.
Land isn't a massive amount of capital though; in developed countries it's a tiny fraction of all capital at this point.
That's one of the main reasons I don't support Georgism: expropriating the value of land would do more harm to investor confidence (how can they trust we won't make up some excuse to expropriate other asset classes as well?) than any benefit it could have. That's probably true even in most developing countries: agriculture doesn't constitute most of the economy, except in the poorest countries.
It's not about how long, arduous, or skilled your work is. It's about how effective your work is at satisfying other people's desires, and how many third parties can (and are willing to) do that even more effectively than you. The highly trained entomologist who spends long hard months categorizing the bug population of East Kreplachistan gets paid less than the vacationing entrepreneur who cleverly notices that Kreplachistani native artwork would go over real well back home and spends an afternoon buying it cheap at the local market, because people collectively want the latter more than the former.
Be very wary of the desire to reduce complicated things to simple analogies; often, in simplifying, you lose the very parts of it that end up being important.
That being said, 'saving' (more properly, investing) can be looked at this way:
Society has two competing collective impulses: people want surplus production (because having too much is a lot less of a problem than not having enough) and people want to minimize waste. For example, a society produces crops. If they don't have enough crops, people starve, so they plant enough crops so that most years will have a surplus. Some of the crops get eaten, some get planted for the next crop, and the rest are surplus. If they don't do something with the surplus, it'll spoil eventually. One thing that can be done is to plant some of the surplus to try for a bigger surplus next year (This is self limiting, because land and labor are limited in the same way; they might not have enough surplus land or workers to plant all the surplus crops). Other things you can do with the surplus (such as trade) have the same effect; anything that produces something in return leaves you better off than letting it go to waste.
Surplus 'work points' work under the same logic as other surpluses. You have no idea what conditions will be in the future when you want to spend the work points on something essential. Therefore, if you have an option to increase your stash of work points by paying someone to do work for you that will generate work points over time, this is a better option than letting them sit around. For example, if you have surplus 'work points' and you know someone with a need for something that can be acquired with work points and insufficient points to acquire it, it only makes sense to acquire it for them if they pay you back more than you give them.
Book Review Request: Joseph Schumpeter's Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy
The number of suicides in US military was much higher in 2020 than in 2018 (384 vs 326).
Does anyone know how this relates to Scott's finding that suicides almost universally went down during the pandemic? https://www.worksinprogress.co/issue/why-didnt-suicides-rise-during-covid/
The data from the US military might be more reliable than much of the other data. Is there reason to doubt the general conclusion from Scott's article? Or is the US military just a weird outlier?
385, not 384. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/jul/26/defense-secretary-concerned-rise-suicides-us-troops
Not sure you can interpret this. There’s lots of subgroups!
I'd be happy to host a Greater London ACX meetup - picnic in Hyde Park or somewhere? @Scott can I ask Claire & Buck if they can fund evidence-based brain-boosting drinks & healthy nibbles?
With some cities reinstating mask mandates I’m wondering what the long term plan is here. Do they expect the number of people vaccinated to increase significantly going forward? If not is there any end to this cycle? Are we going to have new variants every few months and never resume regular life? Have any of these public officials explained what the end game is here ?
I’d love to see a post on “what’s the endgame for COVID.”
Either mandate vaccines and create a streamlined process for RNA for variants or just give up on all restrictions now since it’s basically just a delaying tactic. Personally I prefer streamlined approval with no mandate and no restrictions but a mandate would at least be defensible on some level. What we’re doing now doesn’t seem like it is.
The hope is that the masks keep the number of cases down.
I can see 2 possible reasons why keeping cases down is useful.
1-Wait until more people get vaccinated.
2-Wear masks forever thereby permanently slowing the spread.
If there aren’t going to be a significantly higher amount of people getting vaccinated than it’s just delaying the inevitable.
If this time we stop at mask mandates, then maybe there's hope of this thing converging after another round or two? I could potentially imagine the politics playing out as "every time there's a new variant, you have to do *something*" (for a while, at least) but with the "something" getting increasingly weaker.
If everyone is vaccinated, I think the chance of someone getting in a car crash on the way to the meetup far exceeds the chance of someone getting seriously ill from covid caught at the meetup.
Let's suppose average meetup attendee has to drive 50 miles. Most of this is over busy bay-area streets, which are probably four times more dangerous than the average mile driven in the US. The chance of any car crash is 1 in 366 per 1000 miles driven, so the average attendee's chance of a car crash on the way to the meetup is about 1 in 2000.
What is the probability you catch covid from another vaccinated attendee at a meetup where everybody is fully vaccinated? Hard to quantify, but probably lower than that. And if you do catch it while vaccinated, it will almost always be a very mild case not leading to hospitalization.
Back of the envelope, 99.5% of covid deaths in the US are unvaccinated, versus about half of the population is vaccinated, so the vaccine reduces individual risk of death from covid by 99% through some combination of reducing the risk of infection and reducing the severity post-infection. If covid was less than 100 times worse than the flu pre-vaccine (which seems to be supported by the death tolls), then post vaccine it's not much to worry about.
My null hypothesis is that media will continue to hype any new variant with a few SNPs that make it slightly more transmissible, without regard to the scope of the risk relative to ordinary activities like driving and smoking. Same thing with terrorism -- people find it more interesting than the scope of the risk warrants, so it gets more media coverage than it deserves.
CDC came out with a press release a few hours after i posted this advising vaccinated people to be afraid of delta and wear masks indoors because of a few cases of vaccinated people spreading delta. I'm not sure if I should trust that any more than the bush-era terrorism threat level thermometer. Every government agency has a self-serving bias that involves exaggerating threats to justify increasing its own budget. Being vaccinated reduces risk of catching it by a lot, and reduces risk of spreading it by a lot, so the probability of spread from a vaccinated person to a vaccinated person is reduced by a lot times a lot. The breakthrough cases almost all involve spread from unvaccinated people to vaccinated people or vice versa.
Sounds about right to me. Seems like a good example of the availability heuristic. Risks that are more salient are rated as more likely. Additionally, I think even when people know the numbers they relate to it emotionally as more dangerous.
Hang on, why do you assume Bay Area streets are four times as dangerous as average? They're busyish, yeah, but I started really noticing street design after I got my license, and our streets are amazingly well laid out.* Most of the Bay Area, at least that I've driven, is planned city, with San Francisco the exception. We have busy highways, but also they're *giant* highways. Pretty well set-up safety stuff, too - nice bright crosswalks, very visible to cars, and (at least where I've driven) fairly few unprotected left turns, and lots of left turn lanes. And people may occasionally run reds, but on the whole the rest of the traffic seems pretty nice here - if you signal, someone will probably let you in. It's not an environment that thrives on pushiness.
Are you assuming most miles driven are on empty country roads? And um... speaking of pushiness, if you think we're quadruple, what number on earth would you assign to Boston?
*With a few notable exceptions, but most of the ones I can think of are more annoying than dangerous, San Francisco explicitly excluded.
A wild guess based on high density plus lots of drugs. The state wide average deaths per mile for california is not worse than other states, but I couldn't find more granular data. Also maybe accidents are less-lethal in high density areas due to low speeds, so comparing deaths/mile could be understating the risk of damage or non-lethal injury.
Lots of drugs? Um...
OK, one smells marijuana occasionally. I can count on one hand the number of times I've seen someone driving as if he might be intoxicated in the last, say, five years, and it's usually late at night - I suspected drunk in all three cases, though of course I don't know. If people are driving stoned, they're doing an amazing job of having it be utterly invisible in their car body language.
I don't want to overstep, and I completely haven't looked at statistics - this is just from driving around a lot - but is it possible you're applying statements you've heard about (the worst bits of) San Francisco to the Bay Area as a whole? Like... I can think of *one* person I know who smokes marijuana; she's got pretty severe medical issues and uses it as a painkiller. One lives in a bubble, of course, but... you don't see stoned people wandering around the sidewalks, either. Sure, we legalized, and now every so often there's nasty smoke drifting into the yard, but on the whole people seem to take that stuff at home.
(And we've got plenty of high speed limits - the expressways are 45-50, the freeways 65, and both of them the actual normal speed is 5-10 miles over the speed limit, when they're not filling up. And the expressways are how you get around. Granted, I don't think accidents on them are that common - they tend to be wide, carefully designed, and kept in good repair - but you do see them occasionally.)
(Now, the mountains are different. The mountains are small roads in bad repair with too many curves and people going too fast, not to mention sheer cliff dropping away on one side of the road, and they scare me stiff; I have literally had a friend who lives there tell me I'm not to try to visit her until I've had a *lot* more experience driving. But that's mostly Highway 17, and I don't think most people would classify it as Bay Area.)
Does anyone think that the recent surge in house prices and rents prices is (at least partially) caused by the eviction and foreclosure moratoriums?
Certainly some of the house prices can be attributed to low mortgage rates (payments would be lower). But if people are not leaving the homes they can't afford (due to the moratoriums) then wouldn't that "distort" the market?
Just curious if anyone else sees it that way. I see a lot of people complaining that "hedge funds" are driving up prices. That could be. But I'm not sure where it goes from here.
I kind of feel the foreclosure moratorium should have the opposite effect, driving prices down by boosting supply. If you know you can't afford the house, and it's only a matter of time before you're forced out, then a sudden sharp rise in prices is a God-send -- sell the damn house right away and escape foreclosure, pocketing the extra cash (or eating a smaller loss) as a cherry on top. And the bank would totally agree with that perspective, I think.
My favorite theory for the price rise is fear of inflation -- and almost nothing is seen as more inflation-proof an asset than real estate -- coupled with a perception that these are abnormally low interest rates (due to fantastic waves of monetary stimulus) that won't be seen again for decades. In short, FOMO.
By the way, one side-prediction I have is that when the dust settles we'll see a rash of sad news stories about people in California (among other places) being stuck with incredible real estate tax bills because their valuations were set when they bought the house and the local assessor declines to reduce the valuation to something more reasonable now that prices have normalized (and given that states and counties are going to be hurting for $$ what with their recent COVID expenses). People around me are buying houses for $1.5 million that were $900k a year ago, and the difference between $15,000 and $9000 a year in property taxes is no joke.
My best guess is that the surge in house prices is driven by three major factors:
1. Lots of white-collar office workers, especially in high-paying fields like tech have been working from home since March 2020 and a large subset of them anticipate a hybrid WFH model (e.g. only go into the office 2-3 days/week) in the long term. This gives them a strong incentive to seek more space.
2. Also due to the pandemic, people have been spending a lot less on travel and entertainment. This makes spending a bunch of money on other things, such as bigger houses, a more affordable prospect.
3. Mortgage interest rates have gone down by a lot over the course of the pandemic, from 3.7% at the start of Jan 2020 to 2.8% today (source: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=FJ7L). This bumps up the "how much mortgage can I afford" amount by about 12% according to Google's mortgage calculator.
Would I go to (realistically, host) an in-person indoors ACX meetup in September? --> Depends on the local case rates, but probably not. My rough prediction is that they will still be highish by September and given high-risk status of household members, I'm inclined to be cautious. If they go back to normal, maybe. (Or if I am absolutely sure Covid isn't a serious risk to us, but I'm sufficiently risk-averse that that is a high bar.)
Would I consider it irresponsible to hold one? --> Depends on the local case rates. If they continue their current climb through September (seems highly unlikely, but so does the fact that they're climbing now) then yes. If they've crested and gotten halfway down, no. If they're back to baseline "I think this is probably false positive" levels, then absolutely not.
Scott: the "See all" link on the main page of the blog (Archive view sorted by most recent) is now only displaying the most recent 12 posts rather than lazy-loading through all of them (both before and after your most recent post). Archive view sorted by most popular is still displaying everything, but this is making it rather time-consuming to access old stuff since the order there isn't obvious.
I've confirmed with a friend that he's experiencing the same issue, so it's not my browser at fault, and it was fine a couple of days ago.
It's working properly again. Thanks.
I've been following the group pile-on of Kelsey Piper over on the DSL forum, and I'm absolutely blown away - not for the first time - by what an incredibly nasty, vicious conversation it is over there, how truly horrible the people who dominate that conversation are, and how thin the veneer of rationalism is over the substance, which is nothing but sheer hatred: for the left, for minorities, for normies, for journalists, for anyone and everyone who isn't them.
The situation is that Piper, a Vox journalist who's also part of the rationalist community, wrote a couple of Tumblr posts back in 2019, the entire sum and substance of which was that she and others she knew found US border enforcement policies genuinely upsetting, and those who assumed that those feelings were cynical and performative were wrong. That's it. That's all they said. Later, before the end of Trump's term, she stopped posting on Tumblr entirely.
The hive mind on DSL has decided that: (1) These two Tumblr posts were part of a coordinated campaign of anti-Trump propaganda, as proven by the fact that Piper hasn't written anything about immigration since Biden's election. (2) Even though she never used her feelings as a policy argument, or argued for anything other than "These feelings exist," she must have been intentionally empowering others to do so. Apparently, you're accountable not just for what *you* say, but for everyone that DSL decides is on your side. We live in a society, I guess? (3) The fact that she apparently withdrew from Tumblr entirely before the election, and thus wouldn't be expected to write anything about Biden there, is only further proof of her dastardly scheming. (4) If she was sincere about her feelings on border enforcement, she would necessarily have written about them on Vox - even though that's not her beat on Vox and writing about anything in that professional capacity requires a substantial commitment. (5) If she had actually been dazed and crying herself to sleep in 2019 when this came to her attention, she would have been in that state continuously all this time - because, you know, that's totally how emotions work, fellow humans. Adjusting to a situation and going on with life, after being upset, isn't something that people do. No evil robots here! (6) If she had been a functional human being, she wouldn't have felt emotional distress about the suffering of people who weren't her friends or family in the first place. People who feel a human connection to others outside their tribe don't deserve to be taken seriously. This altruism bullshit is all well and good until someone actually *cares* about it, am I right?
Now these paragons of rationality are solemnly talking about what to do when the principle of charity breaks down, and acting like they have irrefutable proof of Piper's bad faith - whereas if they were capable of *practicing* clear thinking instead of just peacocking about it, they would know that they have no valid evidence at all. Piper, whose work is essentially to spread rationalist values in the mainstream media, is gamely engaging with these preposterous attacks. I don't know whether to admire her for it or shake my head at her for trying to reason with those who are manifestly not motivated by reason.
I would certainly go to a meet up within a reasonable distance if there was a good chance you’d be there. I would check out one nearer even if not. I do not consider it unreasonable to hold them, since for me the pandemic is largely over—I’m vaccinated, everyone I care for is either vaccinated or determined to take their chances, and the level of risk these days is simply not high; it’s time for life to go on.
Regarding the meetups - I run the Atlanta SSC meetup group - we've had over 12 so far - though the lockdown has put a damper on them for the past year or so (mostly we've moved online) - however
I speak for everyone in the group when I say we would all go to an indoors ACX meetup in September, and none of us consider it irresponsible to hold one.